


You're in My Bubble

by benrumo



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dream Bubble, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-10-27
Updated: 2012-11-29
Packaged: 2017-10-25 00:05:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/269405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/benrumo/pseuds/benrumo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Dave and Sollux meet for the first time, they have no idea who the other is and they have no idea that they’re both dead. Dave slowly starts to remember, but Sollux remains clueless. For the first time in recorded history, a human actually knows more about the current situation than a troll. After all the trolling he had to put up with before his death Dave would love to enjoy the irony, but his bifurcated bubblemate is making it really hard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Also on Tumblr, in case that's more your thing: http://unbosomedadoxography.tumblr.com/
> 
> Fun fact: The crazy stuff towards the end of the first chapter is all based on real nonsense I've experienced.

The first thing you’re aware of is how everything feels completely wrong and completely right at the same time. Your body feels completely normal. Every part of Dave Strider is exactly where it should be. Only there’s this weird feeling just under your skin, like bugs crawling around just beneath the surface. That is, if bugs were insubstantial ghosts of real creatures that moved more like wind or water than something living. It’s such a light, almost unnoticeable feeling that you wonder if it isn’t just all in your head.

You pull yourself up into a sitting position. The shitty suits sheet you’ve had since you were just a little cool kid in your first pair of shades slide off you as you rise. Cool air from the open window and the fan whirling away in the corner chill your bare skin. For some reason you can’t really put your finger on, it feels wrong. Your bedroom shouldn’t be this cool, it should be hot as a summer barbeque. You should be a goddamned pork roasting in all this heat. But your brain, which feels like a punchbowl full of ice water’s sloshing around up there instead of proper grey matter, informs you that it is in fact mid-March. Texas may be hot, but you know good and well it’s never that hot on an early spring night.

You think your brain must have been having some really fucked up dreams for you to be this off your game. What are you even doing up, anyway? Did the dreams wake you? You try to remember, but the only thing that comes to mind is this vaguely unsettling feeling deep in your guts that you know is somehow connected to the cool, crawling wrongness under your skin. But just like any other dream, the feelings are beginning to fade. By the time you’ve slipped on a shirt, you can hardly remember the sensation.

Anyway, you’ve got better things to do than sit around dwelling on phantoms. Leave that psychoanalysis shit to Lalonde. Right now you’ve got bigger fish to fry. You’ve just been hit with a wave of inspiration, and your fingers are itching to get at those turntables.

You flip the master volume to your preferred setting and slip on your headphones. No need to wake everyone in a fifty yard radius up. Wait, what the hell are you thinking? It’s four in the afternoon. You’re using the headphones so Bro doesn’t catch all your amateurish (compared to Bro, anyway) mistakes. No need to give that guy any more ammunition than he already has.

You spend a few seconds thinking about the mix set, only to realize you already know exactly what you want. You can hear the music in your head, arranging itself into a goddamned symphony of ill beats and slick rhymes. You’re already fine-tuning the mix in your head, fixing mistakes you haven’t even made yet. When you cue the first beat, it’s like the music drips off your fingers. Everything you touch is golden. No hesitation, no second-guessing. You know exactly what you want, and you know how to make it happen.

You don’t know how long you’ve been at it. It feels like it’s only been seconds, but you can remember each mistake, each triumph as the beats synchronized perfectly at your command. It’s unreal. It’s perfect. When the chance presents itself, you jerk the cord to your headphones out and let the music flood the room. You don’t remember turning on your amps, but fuck that. Doesn’t matter. All that matters is this perfect mix. Best thing you ever made. This mix is your baby, it’s your little baby girl and she’s just won her very first baby beauty pageant trophy. Both of you have trained every moment of her short life for this moment, and now it is all worth it. You couldn’t be more proud.

Especially since somewhere in the back of your mind you know Bro is listening. Hell, everybody in the building is probably listening, you’ve got this glorious shit turned up so loud, but you couldn’t give a rat’s ass about anybody other than Bro. Let them bitch and moan like the uncool slobs they are, uneducated in just how awesome this sweet beat you’re laying down is. Bro’s out there listening, and you’re scratching out your goddamned magnum opus over here.

You bring the mix to the downright climatic finish it deserves, tying all those beats up in an air-tight bow of undeniable sweetness. It’s finished. It’s finished and it’s perfect. You check the timestamp on your computer, partially to make sure that not a single second of that pure, fucking goodness was lost due to some kind of technological slip-up. But it’s all there. Almost fifteen minutes of you at your best.

Any second now, you know Bro’s going to show up at your door. He’ll have Lil’ Cal propped on one shoulder, and both of them will give you a look that affirms just how goddamned cool the three of you are. Bro will give you a fist-bump you’ll still be fondly recalling weeks later. And then the memory will be tainted forever by blood and swords as the best bro-fist you ever received because some monster stole all the time you and Bro had left. Wait, what the fuck are you thinking about? Bro’s about to come in here, bro-fist you, and declare you cool enough to come into his room and make a mix with him. A mix with Bro.

It was a complete disaster that made you realize just how huge the gap between you and Bro was. That gap was the fucking Grand Canyon, and you went and tried to jump that shit on your little plastic tricycle. You went from the top of Cool Mountain to Loser-ville so fast it made your head spin. It was the biggest display of uncool ineptitude you have ever been subjected to in your life, but it was still one of the most awesome moments of broship between the two coolest bros in existence. You’d never admit that to anyone, though. Not even Bro. But you wouldn’t have to. He already knew.

But that was months ago. You didn’t just make this mix, it only popped up in the playlist you were listening to while pestering John. It’s hot as fuck out. You can feel the sun burning your back, signaling that you’re going to have to move if you don’t want to end up a particularly uncool shade of lobster-pink. Lousy stupid goddamn afternoon sun on your lousy stupid goddamn melanin-less skin.

You toss your headphones off and rub your eyes, trying to make out John’s ridiculously blue text against the sun-glare on your screen. It’s almost impossible, even with your shades. You keep meaning to rearrange your room so the sun stops being such a pain in the ass, but you’ve never gotten around to it. You’d have to rewire everything, and that’s just not happening without a damn good incentive.

You try to remember what John was talking about and fail miserably. Something about the same lame game he and the rest of your friends have been going on about for the past couple of months. You don’t think you want to deal with this right now. The icy, dead feeling in your head from this morning is back. Wait, back? You definitely don’t remember feeling like this from this morning. You go to make up some excuse to John about how you’ve got better things to be doin’, fine bitches to be wooin’, when you realize you already have. Something is wrong here. On top of your head feeling like shit, your chest is starting to feel funny too, like the air could just blow right through you.

You think about playing some of Bro’s ironic shitty games to clear your head. A ghostly glare pops up, reflected in the lens of your shades. Only it didn’t pop up because it was always there. You turn your head to see a pixilated skateboarder infinitely grinding between two CG potato chips, his legs and board half-buried in a chunk of cement. The cold feeling in your head and chest intensifies. Every part of you feels ice cold and insubstantial. This is fucking wrong. When the fuck did you get in the living room? You look down to find the Xbox’s controller in your hand. You throw it down so hard the battery pack snaps out.

But you do not lose your cool because you are motherfucking Dave Strider. A Strider never loses his cool. Just fuck that noise right out of the building. Fuck it down into the parking lot, put a bullet in its head, and stuff it in a dumpster when you’re done.

...Maybe you just need to chill out for a bit. You look over at the Smuppet-themed clock Bro keeps by the futon. It’s hella late. Practically early. You wonder why Bro isn’t crashed out like he usually is this time of night. Well, he obviously wouldn’t still be crashed out if you’d been in here playing video games. You can never sneak up on that guy, even in his sleep. He’s just too good for you. But that doesn’t explain why you were in here playing video games when both you and Bro should be catching some Z’s.

But you don’t have to remember why. You know why. It’s completely obvious. Today’s Saturday. Bro’s out making the big bucks DJ’ing and you’re playing video games because what the hell else does a 12 year old do on a Saturday night? You’re not yet tall enough for Bro to sneak you in and let you see him at work. Not all the time, anyway.

Whatever. You don’t feel up for another round of shitty video games. Might as well go to bed.

You turn off the TV and go to pick up the controller, only to find it sitting on top of the Xbox where you always keep it, completely whole and showing no signs of having just been thrown across the floor. The Xbox is off. You didn’t turn it off.

You think about calling Bro’s name, but you don’t do it. This is just the kind of thing he’d think would make a better Strider out of you. Bro’s always pulling shit like this, moving Lil’ Cal around, messing with your stuff, strategically placing plush puppet rump in your face. You’re not sure if he wants you to get good enough to catch him in the act or if he’s trying to help you build up a tolerance to asshattery. Either way, you usually just go with it and don’t lose your cool. Usually, as in when you don’t have a warning siren going off in your head shouting “wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong” and a voice in the back of your head telling you this isn’t Bro, this is something else entirely.

You look around the room for any sign Bro’s around only to find that everything looks wrong. No, it doesn’t. Everything looks perfectly normal. Everything is exactly where it should be. This is your home. You’ve lived here damn near all your life. There’s nothing wrong about this place.

Only there is. The angles are too sharp. There’s too much detail in some places and too little in others. It’s like somebody’s taken the remote control to your head and turned up the contrast until it hurts. The lights are too bright and the dark corners of the room look deep and empty. You don’t want to call it “sinister looking” because you’re not a total wimp like Egbert. You are keeping your cool. It’s not scary, it’s just wrong. You probably just drank some bad apple juice, or something.

You shove your hands in your pockets and stare at the room, determined to wait this bullshit out. If you run like a chicken and let yourself get scared, things are sure to get worse. That’s how it always works, right? You panic and shit gets even more unreal. But if you sit down and face your fears (not that this was actually scaring you), they go away.

Only that doesn’t happen. The more you look, the more that seems wrong with the objects you’ve seen every day for the past 12 years of your life. You get the sudden impulse to put your back against something solid, just so you don’t have to worry about whatever pervasive wrongness is going on behind you. You fight the urge back. Striders’ don’t back down.

If staring isn’t working, maybe blocking everything out will. You close your eyes and try to convince yourself that everything is perfectly normal. You imagine the very normal-looking room you’re going to find when you open your eyes. The coldness in your head has intensified to a headache. You picture exactly where you are in the room. You picture everything around you, and exactly how normal everything is.

While you’re busy imagining, the room shifts. It hits you like a tidal wave, only instead of knocking you off your feet and sweeping you away, it seems to emanate outward from you. It’s like the whole world is expanding and pulling away from you. It’s sickening. You can’t move. You don’t have to imagine, you know right now you are smaller than a thumbtack. You’re a tiny little pinprick in the living room. You can see it without opening your eyes, how huge everything is now and not just in relation to you.

You pull off your shades and force your eyes open. This is it. Dave Strider has lost his cool and you don’t even care. You know no one’s around to see. You know you’re alone for miles and miles and miles.

Everything looks fine. Everything looks fucking fine. You’re not tiny and everything’s not huge. The lights stopped being evil little stars and the shadows stopped being open holes to space. Everything just looks fine.

You take a hesitant step. You’re almost afraid the ground’s going to give out underneath you after what just happened, but it doesn’t. It’s perfectly solid. Your body feels a little shaky and uncertain, and you realize it’s because you’re scared half out of your mind. Probably all the way out of your mind. Is that what this bullshit is? Are you losing your mind?

You go to your room as fast as you can and shut the door behind you. Like that’s going to keep out what’s in your head. You captchalogue the katana you keep mounted above your turntables. You don’t know what the hell you think you’re going to use it against. You’ve given into instinct.

You run a hand across your forehead, wiping away sweat that isn’t there. You don’t feel hot. That rules out the half-baked fever theory you had banging around in the back of your head. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to pretend you’re sick, anyway. Sure as hell would give you some peace of mind back, and taking a nap would probably do you some good. Something’s not right here, but you’re certain, more certain than anything, that there’s no one, nothing here besides you. The feeling brings more fear than it does comfort, but it means you can tell yourself that nothing’s going to sneak up on you while you’re asleep.

You kick your shoes off and crawl into bed. You think about stripping down into boxers, what you normally sleep in, but you can’t bring yourself to do it. Clothes make pretty shitty armor, but they’re better than nothing. You make yourself lay down and close your eyes, but you can only stay that way for a few seconds. You finally compromise between your logic and your instincts. You stay in the bed, but instead of laying down you prop yourself up in the corner so you can watch every other inch of the room.

The last thought you have before you pass out, your head slumped uncomfortably against the wall, is that you are completely and utterly pathetic. So uncool, Strider. So uncool.


	2. Chapter 2

You wake up to an uncertain world. That cold feeling from yesterday is back. It’s under every inch of your skin and pooled deep behind your eyes, but the good news is it’s dulled to an almost comfortable (in comparison, anyway) chill instead of freezing your brain into a solid block of stupid.

Looking back, yesterday’s actions seem so uncool, even more uncool than they already were. It’s embarrassing how quickly you fell apart when things got freaky. Not even scary, just freaky. If this were a horror movie, you’d be that one chickenshit guy who screamed before the monsters even showed up. People would cheer out of relief when you died, grateful that their eardrums were no longer subject to your high-pitched, chump screams.

But you can’t beat yourself up too much about it. You’re not even sure yesterday was yesterday. In fact, you’re pretty sure it wasn’t. Not that you think you’re losing time, you just don’t think time means shit here. It’s just another stupid feeling you can’t explain, but time feels just as unreal as everything else around you. That general feeling of uneasiness is still hanging in the air. Everything still looks wrong, but not in an obvious way you can point out. It could just be the way the light is coming in through the window. The morning sunlight is soft, filtered in through the smoggy city air. Smoggy mornings were a pretty common occurrence, but today the haze is so thick you can look at the sky with your bare eyes without pain.

You fish around in your sheets until you find your shades anyway. You get the urge to go brush your teeth, the first step in your normal morning routine, but you shove it aside. You don’t want to put anything you find in this place in your mouth. You’re convinced it’s not your toothbrush in there, just as you’re convinced that real water won’t be flowing out of the faucet.

You put your shoes back on and change shirts. No need to go around rumpled and wrinkly just because there’s no one around to see. You’ve got an image to uphold, even if it’s only a self-image.

You’re almost fortified back behind your normal walls of coolness when you open your bedroom door. Your poker face doesn’t slip and inch when you don’t find your apartment’s hallway where it should be. The oddly green hallway stretching out longer than the combined length of your building doesn’t freak you out, but it doesn’t reassure you either.

You take a moment to equip your katana to your strife specibus. You know Bro’s not here. You’re pretty certain there’s not another human being around for miles. But you’re not so certain you’re alone anymore.

It’s a crazy idea. What are you expecting, some kind of monster lurking around the corner? Somehow, the thought doesn’t seem that insane. In fact, none of this is seeming as strange as it should. The integrity of your home has been undeniably violated, but it almost feels like an inevitability. No, not an inevitability. More like somebody told you all of this would happen long ago and you forgot.

You hold your hand out as you move forward, still half-convinced you’re going to run into the white, plaster wall that should be there despite what your eyes are telling you. You pass into the foreign space without resistance.

The air feels a little warmer here. There’s a strange smell in the air you can almost taste. It’s acidic and musty, bordering the line between ignorable and unpleasant. As you continue further down the hallway you add metallic to the list.

There are two double doors about halfway down the hallway. One’s tinted blue and the other red. You think about opening the red one but decide against it at the last moment. Maybe it’s a bad idea. If you really have ended up in some kind of twisted horror-verse, you don’t want to leave any dark corners unchecked so some weak chump can come and stab you in the back the moment you let your guard down. But you don’t think you can get them open without making a huge racket. You’re pretty sure any supernatural fuckers lurking around couldn’t either, and you’d rather not give up the element of surprise just yet.

You continue down the hall, wondering as you go if this is some kind of industrial facility. Some kind of weird, green industrial facility. You’ve got a few problems with that theory. For starters, even completely abandoned industrial facilities have markers all over the place. Numbers on the doors, directional arrows on the ground, signs on the wall, that kind of thing. This place doesn’t feel idiot-proofed. And the ground under your feet doesn’t vibrate like metal does or feel solid enough to be cement. You don’t see any of the typical light sources on the ceiling either. You can make out what looks like smooth, concave impressions on the ceiling, but no light fixture are mounted in them. You don’t think it would even be possible to put lights up there.

At the end of the hallway there’s a window, the only source of light that you can see. The light filtering in is no darker than the light was in your bedroom. You realize it’s only the coloring of the walls that makes this place seem so dark. You look around, making sure your surroundings are as empty as they seem, before turning your attention to the window.

You look through one of the many panes in the mosaic, addition sign-shaped window. You half expect to see Houston’s cityscape, and in a way the sight before you isn’t too far off.

Who are you kidding? Green buildings are odd, no matter how you look at it. But the sight is more interesting than it is disturbing, maybe because ultimately there is something familiar about the landscape. It’s easy to believe that these are just incredibly odd buildings. Human beings have done stranger things in the history of the world.

You can count three separate structures through the window. The sky between them is dark and starry. For a moment, you’re thrown off. Where’s the light coming from?

Is that… are those two moons?

You count them again, which is a pretty big waste of time because there’s obviously two of them, one lime green and the other bright pink. You realize belatedly that here, wherever here is, it’s nighttime. The light from the two moons is bright enough for you to see the world outside clearly.

You twist and tilt your head, trying to take in as much of the foreign world outside as you can through the mosaic window. Looking down reveals that these green skyscrapers are miles taller than anything in Houston. You can’t see the ground. You wonder if that means it doesn’t exist, but ultimately decide that line of thought will get you nowhere.

Toto, we ain’t in Texas anymore.

You are 100% sure you could have thought of something cooler to think just now. Anything, really, would have been cooler than that. But you give yourself a break. It’s not every day a boy finds himself in the Twilight Zone. You seriously need to get a reign on these uncool slips, though. You’ve got a reputation to keep as a Strider.

A sound from above draws your attention away from the window. You look up like you actually expect to see the noise through the ceiling. You see nothing, of course. You console yourself with the thought that at least you won’t be that chump in horror movies who never looks up.

You hear the sound again. It’s definitely footsteps echoing down from the ceiling. Not that you’re any expert on decoding footsteps, but you’re pretty sure that there’s only two feet clomping around up there.

You’ve got three options: you can go down and try to find a way out of this massive green monstrosity, you can go up and find whatever’s doing a jig above your head, or you can go back to your room and make a cinder-block-and-bed-sheet fort to hide under like a pathetic little worm.

On the one hand, if your bedroom ended up attached to this freaky ‘scraper, maybe a little bit of Houston did too. Maybe there was actually a way out of this Twilight Zone. If there was, you’d put money on it being in the Houston-side of the Zone. Or maybe you’ll just keep going down until you find the end of the universe, like in a video game when you end up somewhere you don’t belong. Maybe you’ll starve to death before you find out. Your theory about Houston seems pretty weak when the voice in the back of your head reminds you that the home you left wasn’t really your home anyway.

So that option’s pretty crappy. And you’ve got to admit, you’re pretty curious about whatever’s upstairs. As much as you doubt you’re going to find another human being, you’d rather face a monster than go back to your empty apartment.  
Not because you’re scared of being alone. Your Bro’s left you alone for long periods of time ever since you were old enough to feed yourself. A cool guy like your Bro doesn’t have all day to be sitting around playing guardian to a little cool kid. Not like you want him in your hair all the time, anyway. Even stoic, unshakable guys like yourself need a break from puppet shenanigans every once in awhile.

So obviously you’re going to check the noise out. There was pretty much no way you were not going to choose that option. Strider’s don’t go running for the hills at the first signs of danger. Besides, it’s about time you found a use for the mad strife skills your Bro has been training you in since the day you received your first pair of shades.

From where you stand at the window, the hallway stretches out to the right and to the left. There’s a door at either end, and you can tell from here that one is red and the other blue. You’re beginning to sense a theme here. You pick the red door because why not? With no other information to go on, you prefer red over blue. It’s as good a reason as any.

It turns out to be a good decision when the red door reveals a staircase leading upward. You close the red door behind you as quietly as you can, but it still makes a huge racket, just like you expected the first doors you came across to.

The staircase is empty and has another noisy, red door at the top. There are no rails for you to hold on to as you climb, but a series of small, mosaic windows light the way, making you sure of your footing. When you get to the second door, you figure now is as good a time as any to get your sword out. Strife is no doubt eminent.

You stand at the top of the staircase and listen for any noises in the space beyond the door. You can hear a noticeable humming, the kind of sound you’d expect from some kind of machinery. A motor humming, though quieter and smoother than a car’s motor. Maybe a generator-like noise. You’ve never been around a working generator. You can’t think of why you’d know what one sounded like, but then it occurs to you that you heard one when Rose was stuck in that creepy pet mausoleum she has in her back yard.

Wait, what the fuck? You’ve never seen Rose in person before. Yet somehow the image of her sitting in a creepy pet mausoleum typing on her laptop stands clear in your mind. Looking beyond the fact that there’s no way you’ve ever seen Rose before in your life, what would she even be doing in a creepy pet mausoleum? Assuming she even has one. You resolve to ask her the moment you get out of this fucking place and ignore it for now.

You haven’t heard a noise besides the humming since you stepped into the staircase. It’s no guarantee that there’s nothing waiting for you beyond this door, but there’s not much of a guarantee of anything at this point. You could sit around waiting for the whatever-it-is to come looking for you, but let’s get real here. That’s not going to happen.

You open the second red door just enough to peak through. The room beyond is predictably green. Through the crack in the door you can see a chunky desk in the shittiest color of green you’ve ever seen. On top of it is a computer screen with a bunch of red and blue wires trailing out of the back of it. You take a moment to note that none of the wires are ones you’re familiar with, and you are familiar with a ridiculous amount of wires. You are practically ass-deep in wires all the time. Then again, it’s kind of hard to tell with the way they seem to sprout magically from the back of the computer instead of plugging in.

You take a moment to think about how stupid it is to be thinking about wires when there’s some kind of creature lurking around up here unchecked. For all you know, you could have already been spotted while you were busy ogling computer wires.

You can’t see anything else significant through the crack in the door. The desk takes up most of your vision. You can see some kind of crappy black, red, and blue drawing on the far wall, but that’s about it.

You bust into the room, throwing the door open with your free hand and leading with your katana. Shit just got real.

You sweep your eyes across the room. You even check out the ceiling, but there’s no sign of the creeping chump you heard downstairs.

The computer chair on your right is empty, but the screen is active and covered in all kinds of programs you don’t recognize. So many red and blue wires crisscross across the floor that it puts your own hookup to shame. Nestled in between the cords are giant, multi-colored worms. As if this place couldn’t get any freakier. There’s a window opposite the door with red and blue curtains (because no other decorative options exist), and to the right of that is a huge, green pile of shit with red and blue slime oozing out of it. To the left are what could not be anything but huge rectangular beehives jutting straight up out of the floor. The hives actively drip honey and you realize that the source of the humming is in fact the bees' buzzing. Most all of the wires trailing across the floor seem to lead to the hives.

You sweep your eyes across the room again. The big, green pile of shit seems to sit flush with the wall (or as flush as it could, given it’s a huge pile of shit). You doubt anything is hiding in the slime inside, but you’re resolved to keep your eyes on it anyway. You kick the computer chair out of the way to reveal nothing hiding under the desk but a big, grey, molten turd decorated with more red and blue nonsense. The chair you kicked topples over when it catches on the exposed wiring behind it. You hear a squelch and a high-pitched screech as the back of the chair squashes down on one of the multi-colored grubs. Pink blood and guts seep out from under the chair.

You are pretty sure there was no reason at all to do that.

The other worms on the floor give an occasional twitch, but otherwise remain dormant. You are as certain that they are not a threat as you are that they are not the source of the noise you heard earlier.

You turn to the other side of the room. All that’s left is the beehives. They stand maybe a foot away from the wall, more than enough space to hide creeping chumps. You step forward as cautiously and as closely as you dare. The bees seem to take no notice of you. You think maybe they’re domesticated. You hope they are, because the best plan you have in mind right now is to cut straight through the hives, revealing whatever may be lurking behind them before it has a chance to get the jump on you.

You raise your sword and prepare to strike. In the moment it takes you to complete the action, you notice a glint of red between the hives. There is something back there.

Your sword rips itself from your hand with enough force to make your fingers and wrists sting. You watch, astonished, as your sword embeds itself in the wall by the door, crackling with an electric red and blue haze. You grapple around in your inventory, looking for something else you could use as a weapon, but before you mind can even process the images within your capchalogue cards, you’re swept off your feet with a blow that feels like a hurricane. You are whipped up into the air with such force that your shades start sliding off your face. You reach up and secure them on instinct.

You spin your head around so fast it makes your neck hurt, trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. You kick your legs. You’re practically flailing even though you can feel that nothing’s got a hold of you. You’re somehow suspended upside down in mid-air, with nothing to hold you there.

From somewhere below you, you hear a voice speak.

“Thay away from my beeth.”


	3. Chapter 3

You really don’t enjoy being upside down. Putting aside the fact that you’re stuck like this against your will, you are pretty sure you look incredibly uncool right now. You’ve got to keep a hand glued to the side of your head to keep your shades form falling off. Your shirt has slid half way up (down?) your chest, but you’re not going to waste your only free hand holding it in place.

But sometimes (and this only applies to the most extreme of situations) there are more important things to concern yourself with than the current level of coolness you’re exhibiting. You are willing to be persuaded that this is one of those times, but you’re not quite there yet.

The fact that you’re upside down, disarmed, and generally helpless is a pretty good incentive to label this situation critical. But you can’t help but to feel that the mostly-humanoid figure in front of you, whether or not he’s the one who’s got you in this compromising position, is just too dorky to be a real threat. All the freaky shit around you suddenly makes a weird sort of sense. The computer hook up, the insects, the 3D glasses stuck in the middle of the pasty, grey face. This guy is a grade-A dork. A monster dork, but a dork nonetheless.

You’re so consumed with the sheer magnitude of this guy’s dorkiness you drop the ball on lobbing some choice words back at him about this compromising situation he’s put you in.

“What kind of mutant beathd are you? Can you even thpeak?”

Oh, god, those teeth. Those massive, monster teeth jutting out of this dork’s upper jaw. They’re making him lisp. Alright, there is no doubt left in your mind. This situation is critical. Critically stupid.

“Can you? Jegus, dude, how to do even eat around those engorged protrusions? Please tell me those are fake and you’re just another preteen sparkly, Twilight wannabe, because I think I might actually have to pity you if those are a permanent part of your anatomy.”

You are dropped unceremoniously on your head. No doubt the freaky dork could have placed you down with a little more finesse and just dumped you out of spite. You land elbow-first in honey, but far enough away from the actual hives to keep the bees from swarming on you.

The moment your head readjusts to a right side up perspective, you notice the sword pointed at your neck. Your sword, in the hands of this skinny, dorky monster.

“Big mistake, dude.”

You fix the dork with your best smug glare just long enough for it to register on his face. Then you move, and show him the true stupidity of his actions.

Before the 3D monster-dork can so much as flinch away, you’ve kicked your sword out of his hand and up into the air. A split-second later, it’s back in your hand where it belongs. But you don’t stop there. Before the monster-dork can pull any more cheap tricks, you pin him to the ground. It’s a beautiful reversal that ends with your sword laid firmly across his neck and your other hand fisted tight in his short, greasy hair, just south of those little candy corn colored horns.

“Pull any more of that gravity-reversing shit, and I’m taking you with me,” you warn him. “Now, I’ve got some questions and you’re going to answer them as politely and enthusiastically as you can, or I’m going to…”

The monster-dork doesn’t give you time to finish your threat. A particularly dangerous-looking red and blue spark starts to form between his horns. You have got to put that shit out of commission before you end up at another disadvantage. You use your grip in his hair to lift his head up, careful of your sword at his neck, and slam it as hard as you can to the ground.

The spark sputters and dies as the monster-dork screams. It is really the most pathetic sound you’ve heard, and that’s saying something given that only five minutes ago you heard the death rattle of a neon pink maggot. Your belief that this guy is a complete dork is unnecessarily fortified as you realize he probably has as much natural defenses as a toddler. He can’t take a hit any better than the maggots writhing on his floor.

The part of your head that’s not pitying the monster-dork is incredibly grateful that slamming his head into the ground worked. As defenseless as this guy may be, all those pointy bits and the fact that you just got first-hand experience on what life would be like as a bat indicates that his offense might make up for his shitty defense.

“What the fuck did I just say?” you shout, tugging his head back up in warning. “No more magic tricks. Now are you going to behave or am I going to have to manually induce some sense into your ugly, grey skull via your ugly, green floor?”

“It’th not magic, you primordial inthectoid, it’th pthionicth.”

“You want to run that by me again, Daffy Duck? I’m not sure I caught all of that. I was too busy admiring the way your tongue got caught on those monstrous vampire buck-teeth of yours.”

“What the fuck do you want from me?” the monster-dork screams up at you. Looks like you struck a nerve.

You think maybe you should lay off the lisp jokes a little. As fun as it is to get this wimp riled up, it’s not why you’re here.

“I want you to tell me who you are, what you are, and what the fuck you’re doing here.”

“What do you think I’m doing in my own hive?” the monster-dork hisses up at you. “Fuck, you’re crathy, aren’t you? You’re grubfucking insane.”

You ignore the insect references and the slurs on your sanity to consider what you hadn’t before: maybe this dork is actually just as confused as you are.

“Is this your place?”

“Yeth. Did you not realithe that when you came in here and tharted killing my grubth?”

Even beaten down, the monster-dork’s pretty lippy. He doesn’t bother hiding his irritation. You find yourself respecting that, despite how dorky he is.

“You want to explain how I ended up here?”

“Are you even lithening to yourthelf? How do you esthpect me to know that?”

“I don’t know, maybe because your creepy-ass green hallway appeared outside my bedroom door?” you drawl, readjusting the sword at the monster-dork’s neck as a small reminder not to push his lippy-ness too far.

“Damn it, you’re completely inthane! Why don’t you juth fuck off and bother someone elth with your nonthenthe?”

“I’m not really appreciating the attitude, dude. Want to reevaluate your answer?”

“FUCK. OFF.”

The sparks start up again and you reacquaint the monster-dork’s head with the floor. He doesn’t scream this time, just whimpers. It hurts him bad enough that he puts a hand to the no-doubt forming goose egg despite the sword at his throat.

“You’re a slow learner, aren’t you? No fucking mind-tricks.”

“I wathn’t trying anything,” he moans. “Thomtimeth I can’t control it.”

“Yeah, totally believable story, dude. Now do you have any information on where my bathroom went or not?”

“I don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about! How many different wayth can I put that before you underthand?”

You review the facts: Your apartment is no longer your apartment. You are 100% sure that wherever the fuck you are, it isn’t home. The fact that your hallway got replaced with this Twilight Zone bullshit is only further proof of what you already knew. It is not an unreasonable stance by any stretch of the imagination to think that this monster-dork, the only sentient creature for miles as far as you’re aware, has something to do with this.

But if this isn’t your home, maybe it’s not unreasonable to consider that it might be his. He seems pretty convinced it’s his shit you’re wrecking, at any rate. Dork or not, you aren’t ready to take this guy at his word, but maybe this doesn’t have to be about trusting him. Something tells you there’s more at play here, and you’re willing to at least entertain the thought that this guy isn’t out to get you. After all, he wasn’t the one who burst into your room looking for answers.

“Alright, so your stance is you’ve got no idea what I’m doing here.”

“Yeth. Thank you for finally—”

“Shut up.”

You punctuate the command with a light press of your sword, not enough to cut but enough to get his attention.

“How many moons are there outside?”

“Go find someone elth to play your crathy gameth with, pthycho.”

“Do I need to bust your skull one more time for you to get the picture, monster-dork? You’re either going to play along with my crazy questionnaire or you’re going to get your neck sliced in two. You’re not in a position to argue. Play along or I’ve got no use for you.”

The sparks start up a third time. All it takes is a jerk on his hair to get them back under control.

“Fuck! Alright, alright!” he winces.

The fight goes out of him all at once. You can almost see it bleeding away, leaving him even smaller and more pathetic than he already was.

“What wath the quethion?”

“Moons, monster-dork. How many are there and what color are they?”

“Two, pink and green. Arkatha and Dolurend, if that wath going to be your nethk quethion.”

“Nope. Don’t give a shit. Next question: What is this place?”

“I thought we already ethablished that thith wath my hive.”

“Caught that. I’m talking more general, more along the lines of what world is this?”

The monster-dork doesn’t answer immediately. The pause is only slight, but it’s there. The 3D dork-shades don’t stop you from reading his facial expression clear as day. He’s calculating something, probably you from the way you think his eyes are focused. The change doesn’t seem to bring the fight back to him, but it makes you cautious anyway.

“Alternia. Can I athk a quethion now?”

Alright, Toto, we’re really not—

No. No, damn it, you are not going back there.

You’re not sure how to handle that information. You already knew this wasn’t Earth, at least on some level. The two fucking moons kind of tipped you off to that. But there’s a difference between realizing you’re not home and realizing you’re in someone else’s home. You’re not quite sure where to go from here yet.

On top of that, there’s something oddly familiar about the name Alternia. It’s like a little bell ringing at the back of your mind. You know this, somehow.

But you shove the thought off. You probably just heard it before in a sci-fi movie. Not like it’s an incredibly creative name. In fact, you think you’ve probably heard it before in a dozen different late night B-movies.

You decide to humor the monster-dork while your brain processes the new information.

“Yeah, I’ll bite. Just don’t waste my generosity on being a shit. This could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here, Slick. Especially if you make another valiant attempt at convincing me to drastically shorten your lifespan.”

“Yeth, I get it already. You’re thuper throng and sthary and my life ith in your handth.”

“Question, monster-dork.”

He gives you another one of those calculating looks that makes you uneasy. You don’t like the idea that he’s carefully planning his answers. You’d prefer terrified, honest remarks to carefully calculated ones.

“Are you a vagrant thowaway?”

“What?”

“I’m athking how you got here,” he explains, a touch frustrated. He probably assumed you literally couldn’t understand him. You got the words fine, it’s the meaning you’re lost on. “Did you come here ath a thowaway on one of our sthpathe thipth? Are you an alien?”

It takes you a moment to work out that the horribly mangled words coming out of his mouth were actually “space ships.”

“Space ships…” The plot fucking thickens. “Dude, I didn’t come here from any ship. I came from downstairs.”

The monster-dork sighs and drops his head down to his wired floor. He obviously doesn’t believe you. Hard to blame him, but it still pisses you off.

“Alright, fine. Let me show you. If you can’t see it, I’ll just go back home and leave you the fuck alone. Sound fair enough?”

The monster-dork lifts his head and gives you another look.

“Thow me what?”

“You want to know, get up off your ass and come see.”

“OK,” he says, a little too quickly for your comfort. “Let me up.”

“Not so fast, monster-dork. I’m not a complete idiot. We’re doing this my way.”

It takes some careful maneuvering, but you manage to rearrange the two of you into an acceptable position for navigating the way back to your room. You end up behind monster-dork’s back with your sword still mostly at his neck but angled in a way so you can bash him upside the head with the hilt the moment you start sensing any shenanigans. You’ve still got your hand in his greasy hair in case he decides to try and throw you anywhere with his brain-powers. It’s not a perfect position for coercion by any means. If somebody had you in this position, there would be so many ways you could get free and teach the asshole harassing you a lesson. You’re banking on the monster-dork being as physically unskilled as you suspect he is.

“Downstairs,” you order once you’re assured that both of you can walk without tripping over one another. “Let’s get this over with.”

You start worrying that your bedroom door won’t be there as you maneuver down the stairs. What the fuck are you going to do then? Just tell monster-dork “whelp, sorry for the trouble, bro, but I’ve got to go hunt down my universe”? You know you’re screwed the moment you take your sword away from monster-dork’s neck. If you can’t get him to understand that you’re not some psycho set out to wreck his shit, you’re as good as dead. Maybe you’re good as dead anyway.

The two of you round the corner and, thank god, your door’s still there.

“That’th not thuppothed to be there,” monster-dork points out.

“No shit, Sherlock,” you say, trying to hide your relief. “Welcome to my fucking world. Actually, I should probably say that with a touch less sarcasm. Come on. Go open the door and let me properly welcome you to my world. Or what’s left of it.”

Monster-dork’s almost more eager to get down the hallway than you are. You’ve got to slow him down to keep him from tripping the two of you up. No sense in accidentally impaling him now that he might actually believe you.

Monster-dork hesitates at the door. He turns his head, almost like he’s asking permission from you. You kind of doubt that’s the real reason for his hesitation, but you tell him to go on anyway.

The two of you maneuver awkwardly around the door as monster-dork pulls it open, revealing (thank fucking god) your bedroom inside. Once the door is open, he doesn’t make any move to step across the threshold like you expect him to. He just stands there and stares.

“Believe I’m not crazy now?”

You try not to be too smug about it, but it’s hard.

“Thith ith your hive?”

“No, it’s not my hive. I don’t keep bees in my bedroom.”

“You’ve got no idea what a hive ith, do you?”

“Depends on whether or not you’re referring to some bullshit cultural terminology I know nothing about. Where I come from, ‘hive’ means those massive, yellow towers you’ve got growing upstairs,” you tell him. You’re starting to grasp that just because the two of you are speaking English doesn’t mean things aren’t getting lost in translation. “Want to tell me what it means to you?”

“Thothe are my beehouthe mainframeth. A hive ith the building you live in,” monster-dork explains, almost absentmindedly as he ogles your stuff. “Fuck, you’re not crathy, are you? You’re really an alien.”

“I appreciate your ability to state the obvious. It’s helping to keep us on the same page,” you say, only half-sarcastic. Something in the back of your head tells you that dealing with this dork’s alien terminology is going to be a ridiculous pain in the ass. “You ready to call a truce? I don’t have anything against you, monster-dork. I opened my bedroom door this morning and found your house, hive, whatever where the rest of my hive should be. I didn’t come here to terrorize you or your insects. I’m just trying to figure out what the fuck is going on and how to get back to where I belong.”

The monster-dork doesn’t say anything. You don’t know what you’re going to do if he doesn’t agree to call a truce. If he gets the upper hand again, he’ll kick your ass. Maybe even kill you. It’s probably stupid of you to even consider trusting him, but what other options do you have? You can’t separate yourself from him. His house is somehow right outside your bedroom door. You’re stuck together whether you like it or not. At least, until your bedroom door decides to pull more Twilight Zone bullshit. The only other option is killing him now and being done with it, but you know you won’t do it. Jegus, how could you?

“Shit, do you want to go back to trying to kill each other?” you demand when the silence drags on too long for your comfort.

“What? Oh, no, thorry, I wath juth… Yeth, I believe you. Truce. Put your thword away.”

“No psychic bullshit?”

You try to make it sound like a warning, but it comes out too uncertain.

“Ath long ath you promithe not to kill anything elth, me included.”

“Yeah. I think I could manage that.”

You hesitate, wondering just how bad of an idea this is. This guy will have the advantage on you the moment you take your sword away from his neck. He’s a long-range fighter, you can tell that much from the thirty-second strife you had earlier. It’s due to sheer luck and him vastly underestimating your physical skills that you’re alive right now. You doubt monster-dork’s dumb enough to make the same mistake twice.

“Fuck… Alright, dude. I trust you.”

Monster-dork stumbles a couple of feet away the moment you capchalogue your sword. He plants his back against your open door and rubs at all the sore places you’ve left on him, all the while giving you this look like he’s the one in danger of getting stabbed in the back.

“Lay it on a little thicker, why don’t you?” he mumbles.

“What was that, monster-dork?”

“Would you thop calling me that? I’ve got a name, you know.”

“Actually, I don’t. Maybe it’s time we introduced ourselves.”

You hold out your hand for him to shake.

“Dave Strider, resident of Planet Earth. Former resident.”

Monster-dork eyes your hand for a moment, but takes it in his own grey one. Guy’s got hands like a baby. A malnourished, overgrown baby with hands the size of your face, but with skin velvet-soft compared to your own callused palms.

“Captor. For the record, I’m a troll, not a monster.”

Troll.

Jegus fuck, that one word sets off a kaleidoscope of images in your head. More than images, memories. First they’re just memories of some assholes on the internet who trolled you and your friends. You start to remember screen names: gallowsCalibrator, adiosToreador, carcinoGeneticist. All those assholes with their same shitty, poorly-coordinated troll tactics. The same alien terminology you just heard coming from Captor’s mouth. Then you remember SBURB, your whole neighborhood being destroyed, your house being mutated with grist, and your bedroom filled to the brim with imps and dead Daves. Brainless feathery assholes. Time travel. The end of the world. Jack Noir. All of it. _The fucking trolls._

“Oh, shit.”


	4. Chapter 4

“Oh shit,” you repeat. “You’re a troll.”

Captor eyes widen as he quickly jumps to his own conclusions.

“You have heard of uth.”

You’re really starting to wish you hadn’t. It’s hard to think as your brain tumbles through all this new information. Not that you can honestly call it new information when you should have known it all along. You try to make sense of the situation you’re currently in while the memories of these past couple of days (God, you hope they were the past couple of days. How long have you been here?) rush in your mind’s eye like a movie in fast forward.

One conclusion is apparent and obvious: Whatever this place is, it’s not Alternia and it’s not Earth. Both are dusted. You’re both still in the game.

“What color text do you type in?” you ask.

You didn’t pay enough attention to the trolls, especially at the beginning, to know more than a handful of their names, and of those few Captor isn’t among them. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you haven’t talked to him before. Screen names and real names you’ve probably long forgotten, but you think that if you have met this guy before, you’ll remember him by his text color if nothing else.

“What?”

“Try and keep up. It’s time for crazy questionnaire round two. What text color do you type in?”

“When? I type in black most of the time, like any normal troll.”

“Even when you’re talking to your friends online? Fuck, what is the name of your messenger client… It’s got ‘troll’ in it, like everything else you guys talk about. It’s like you can’t get enough of your own species’ name.”

“Trollian?”

“Yes. We’re slowly managing to attack this deceptively complex question. What color is your text on Trollian, Captor?”

“Yellow, same as my blood,” Captor tells you.

He looks down, then pulls at his shirt, pointing to the mustard yellow Gemini symbol on it.

“That color?”

“Yeth.”

You don’t remember it. Not even the faintest of bells are ringing in your head. You decide to switch tactics.

“You’ve never heard of humans?”

“No. Thorry.”

“Stupid pink aliens who fuck everything up? Not ringing a bell for you at all?” you press, trying to think of any other possible insults that might jog this guy’s memory. Assuming he actually has memories of you.

“Not a thingle one.”

“Fuck.”

Well, that blows that theory out of the water. Maybe you’re back in time, back before Alternia was destroyed. It’s just about the only logical conclusion you can draw right now. The only trolls still alive should be the ones who played the game. If he’s not one of them, this can’t be part of the game, plain and simple. At least, it can’t be a part of their session. You are still in the game. You have to be. The only question is how you got here. Alternia was destroyed before Earth even existed, according to the rules of SBURB. You didn’t think your powers were strong enough to send yourself this far back in time. Why would you even bother? You have no memory of this stable time loop. You’re outside of the Alpha timeline. Fuck, are you a doomed Dave?

Captor interrupts your temporal musings.

“Mind telling me what my blood color hath to do with any of thith? Where have you heard of trollth before?”

“Doesn’t matter. What should be here?”

You point to your room.

“You mean when your world ithn’t there?” He thinks for a moment. “Nothing. That wall thould lead outthide.”

You step past him and go back into your room. You expect to feel something as you travel from one world to the next, some kind of static in the air or shiver down your spine, maybe even that weird, cold, wrong feeling that’s been plaguing you since you woke up in this place. Anything to indicate that you really have just breached the barrier between two worlds. The cold in your head is still there, it’s basically a permanent part of your anatomy at this point, but it doesn’t waver or intensify. In other words, nothing changes. Not even the air pressure.

You walk over to your window and look outside. Houston’s still there, faithful and waiting. Only it’s really not. You know it’s not. You can remember the damage the smaller meteors did before you were warped to LOHAC. None of that damage is there now. Houston is just as was before the game.

Only too quiet. Where’s all the noise? You can’t believe you didn’t notice how quiet it was before all this Alternian nonsense started. It’s like being in a vacuum. The silence is somehow more perverse than anything else you’ve experienced in the past few hours.

You tighten your grip on the windowsill until the metal slats start cutting into your hand. You can feel the piled-up grit on your palms: dust, dirt, and dead bugs. It feels too real not to be. Maybe it is real. Maybe you actually brought your home back in time with you, your past home, back before Jade mutated the hell out of it with grist. It doesn’t make much sense, but not much does right now.

You turn your head. Monster-dork’s right where you expect him to be, hanging at your doorway like a dumb-struck vampire.

“You can come in. If it didn’t kill me crossing over into your world, I don’t see why the reverse would kill you.”

He steps hesitantly into your bedroom. You watch, half-amused despite the situation, as he tests each square inch of ground before putting his weight on it, like he thinks this all might be some elaborate illusion.

He doesn’t flinch, hardly even takes notice, as you walk behind him. He sure as hell takes notice when you plant your hands square on his back and push him into the middle of your room. Monster-dork jumps a foot in the air. Maybe even higher. He screams, flails, and honest-to-god sparks blue and red as he fights to regain his balance. You are now willing to believe that he really doesn’t have complete control over the pyrotechnics.

Once he’s no longer in danger of face-planting, he whips around and fixes you with a murderous look. He even bares his goofy buck-alien-fangs at you. You give him your best impassive stare and watch how it drives his anger up another notch.

You can hear a series of low clicks, like bad feedback from a speaker. You wonder if he managed to jerk on one of your cords while he was flailing. You really hope not. Messing with monster-dork wasn’t worth screwing up your sound system.

“You going to take a look anytime soon?” you ask, tilting your head slightly to the window.

“Wath that really nethethary?”

“I don’t have all day to wait around for you to grow a pair. Go check out the window. That’s not Alternia out there.”

There’s another sharp, clicking sound, like those pop rock fireworks you throw on the ground to scare the shit out of the unsuspecting but several octaves lower. The sound kind of hurts your ears, but nothing follows it. You wonder if the noise might have something to do with Captor’s psychic mumbo-jumbo as he takes a look out the window.

“Wow. Fuck.”

Captor hovers at your window like he’s afraid Houston’s going to reach out and bite him.

“You should see it when it’s actually alive and full of assholes. We have got a whole spectrum full of assholes here, you wouldn’t even believe. We’ve got assholes playing ten galleon buckets. We’ve got assholes smoking like chimneys and kicking dogs. We’ve got asshole little punks pissing in the alleyways. Hell, we’ve even got asshole grannies. You just could not even imagine the spectacular array of assholes that leech off this city,” you comment, going over to lean on the side of the window sill. You’re more interested in watching his reactions than looking back out on the memory-ghost town. “It’s too quiet like this for you to get a real impression of a Houston morning.”

“It’th not normally like thith?”

“Fuck no. This time of day there should be cars filling the streets and bums filling the sidewalks. In fact, that’s what it should look like pretty much every hour of the day. It’s practically not even Houston empty like this.”

“Where’d all your humanth go?”

“If I knew that, do you think I’d be here talking to you, monster-dork?”

Captor grimaces at the return of his nickname. The slip was practically unintentional. As close to unintentional as a cool kid like you gets, at any rate. You’re pissed and he’s too easy a target. Sure, it’s not fair, but neither is the fact that your bathroom is vaporized. Nothing is more sacred than a man’s bathroom.

“Let’th go up to the roof,” he suggests.

“We can’t get to it from here, unless you decide to sprout magic fairy wings and fly us up there.”

“Not your roof, mine,” he says with obvious impatience.

You sweep your hand to the side in a dramatic “lead the way” gesture that is apparently universal enough for your new alien buddy to understand.

Captor leads you back down the green hallway to the blue door you didn’t go in earlier. You follow him silently up another staircase and into a room you suspect is the mirror image, architecturally, to Captor’s bedroom. It’s full of so much junk, most of which looks suspiciously like decomposing organic matter, that it’s like playing a game of hopscotch just getting across the room.

“So, this red and blue theme you’ve got going on here. Did that come with the place or with you?” you ask, trying to ignore the acidic, metallic, and generally rotten smell flooding your nostrils.

A familiar red and blue haze flashes on the ceiling for a split second before a trap door pops inwardly open.

“Ith that really important right now?”

“It is the most important of all the questions. I literally will not be able to go on if you don’t grace me with an answer.”

Captor turns and pushes his dorky 3D glasses up far enough for you to see his eyes. You’re probably supposed to intimate some kind of answer from his look, but you’re too caught up in the physical facts. His eyes are white. Pure, blind as fuck white. Dead white.

You know this should mean something to you. It doesn’t.

“I’m going to take thatithfathion in the fathkt that you know nothing about my thpecieth and have no idea juth how much of a mutant freak I am.”

There’s no bite to his words. In fact, there’s a pronounced weariness under all that “I’m too preoccupied to give a shit.” You find yourself relating to it. You got pretty damn sick of explaining your own mutations, especially when you were in school and the teachers wouldn’t accept that your eyes were sensitive as fuck and let you wear your shades in class.

Captor contemplates the hole in the ceiling for awhile, then turns back to you.

“You thould probably thay here,” he suggests. “My luthuth ith up there.”

You remember hearing all kinds of shit about how Bro was your adult-human lusus, but you aren’t exactly sure what a troll lusus is. Some kind of animal, if your memory is finally deciding to be reliable.

“I can take care of myself.”

“That’th not the point. He’th going to throw a huge bitchfetht if he theeth you. It’ll take me hourth to calm him back down.”

You look down to the floor, find a path through all the crap, and then you move. You’re nowhere as good as Bro at flash stepping, but you’re still pretty damn good. Good enough to leave an impression on Captor, at any rate. Not that you think impressing him is that difficult. You are all up in monster-dork’s personal space when you stop, and he flips the fuck out. You’ve got to catch his wrist so he doesn’t fall and get lost forever in the massive piles of his own junk.

“Then I just won’t let him see me,” you say with a satisfied smirk.

“Fine,” Captor snaps.

Then he’s hugging you.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

You go to push him off, but change your mind when your feet lift off the ground. You change it so hard it flips the full 180 degrees and you’ve got your arms wrapped around him instead.

“Don’t thquirm tho much,” Captor orders, his voice muffled in your shoulder but shoulder but still so undeniably smug. “Wriggler.”

Revenge. There is no doubt in your mind. He just got you back for that stunt you pulled in your room, and he got you back good. You are almost impressed. Almost.

The moment Captor sets you down, he shoves you aside. You’re primed and ready to make some crack about being a little more gentle on the first date when he breaks out in a run.

“Captor?” you call after him, but monster-dork is long gone. Whatever’s got his attention, it is officially more important than his alien hive-intruder. You’ve got to figure that anything that ranks higher than you on his give-a-shit-o’meter has got to be something significant.

He’s muttering senselessly to himself by the time you’ve joined him over by the vaguely Japanese-looking construction on top of his roof. He has a huge, white ring held in his hand attached to a chain. It reminds you of a dog collar, only much, much larger.

“He’th gone. Thombody thole him. No, fuck, that’th thupid.”

“Mind telling me what’s got you flipping your shit over there?”

He spins around, looking for something that is definitely not you. You think it’s pretty much a wasted effort. You’ve only been up here ten seconds. It’s not even your house, and you can still tell there’s nowhere for anything to hide up here. Especially not something big enough for that collar.

“My luthuth is gone.”

He’s got a hold on that collar like it’s a lifeline. You’re starting to get worried that you’re going to have to pry it from his fingers to keep him from tangling himself up on the chain as he spins.

“That’s not good,” you say, going for the culturally sensitive response. If you remember right, this is probably a big fucking deal. You figure it couldn’t hurt to show the guy a little sympathy.

Captor finally stops spinning around and his eyes focus on you.

“No thit, Therlock.”


	5. Chapter 5

It was an obvious suggestion, but it had incredibly unintended consequences. You watch, not exactly helpless (come on, now), but thoroughly unable to alter the course of events you invariably started.

Monster-dork is flipping the fuck out. His shit has flown so far off the handle it’s probably getting hitched to border-hopping cow patties back in Texas. He has more or less demolished two fugly green sky scrapers and shows no sign of stopping. You are once again assuredly the coolest kid in this existence. Not that there was ever any real doubt of that.

At first, you were pretty damn impressed (impressed, not intimidated) by monster-dork’s sudden display of power. Then you realized that power doesn’t count for shit if you can’t use it for anything productive and started watching monster-dork’s disco show with only a mild interest. All this power and he couldn’t even get the upper hand on you when it counted. You’re not even certain that he’s intentionally destroying everything in sight. The first laser-eye cannon, sure, you’ll believe was intentional. This wanton destruction, not so much.

You don’t know what the big deal is. All you said was that maybe his little piece of Alternia was as empty as your bit of Houston. But you guess not everyone can be as cool about things as you.

You watch as Captor makes another desperate loop above your head, like a bug in a glass jar searching for an exit that isn’t there. You thought that the level of sheer, pathetic stupidity monster-dork was exhibiting had maxed out the fourth time he made this same, futile loop, but he manages to surprise you. Once he completes the latest loop (number seven, by your count), he starts flitting hopelessly in the air. He floats a couple of feet to the left, gives up, and floats back to the right. Rinse, recycle, repeat, like a dejected firefly.

You’re not sure, but the psycho-static aura around him seems to be slowing down. When he first went on his little rampage, his glow-field strobed between red and blue so fast that the two made sweet color love and became purple. Now you can see the distinction between the colors again. His dejected firefly act is slowly losing altitude as well. You take it as a sign that he’s finally running out of steam. Good. Maybe he’ll deign to join you back down here on planet Earth again. Alternia. Whatever, you’re not picky.

Then whatever’s fueling Captor’s psychic rage completely runs out. One second he’s a seizure-inducing firework, the next he’s a stone plummeting down so fast that all you can see of him is a faint, black streak against the recently ruined city.

“Oh, shit.”

You flash step to the end of the roof, but even your considerable speed can’t keep up with how fast monster-dork is falling.

You shout his name, thinking maybe he’s passed out or just fucking forgot he was suspended miles above terra firma. It’s about all you can do, but it doesn’t help. Monster-dork sinks down into the black recess you’re not really sure is ground and out of sight.

Well, fuck. There goes your only human contact. Humanoid contact. Still, it was something, even if he was a lispy, dorky bastard.

So, what will you do?

You’re standing over the trap door, wondering what you’re going to do if monster-dork was actually some kind of game construct meant to guide you through this bizarro-world, when you hear a scraping sound behind you.

Just like a zombie in a cheesy, late night flick, monster-dork claws his way back onto the roof one scrawny, gray arm at a time.

“Fuck, dude, what was that?”

“Ngkr…” came the intelligent response.

Monster-dork crawls across the roof. Literally crawls, and is that sobbing you hear?

“You finished with your little temper tantrum, or are we winding up for round two?”

Yep, that is definitely sobbing you hear, sobs and groans as monster-dork scrambles to his feet and totters drunkenly towards you.

“Thut up.”

His 3D goggles are gone, no doubt lost somewhere in the gaping abyss, and the empty whites of his eyes spark unevenly red with only the faintest flashes of blue. Shit, they’re like mood rings.

“THUT UP THUT UP THUT UP THUT UP THUT UP THUT UP THUT UP THUT UP!!!”

You have about half a second of prep time before one hundred and twenty pounds of bony, grey troll hits you like a runaway freight train. You try to shove him off, but he hits your arms as solid as steel. Bastard must still have some psychic-fight left in him. You get a face full of elbows and jagged nails before you switch tactics and go for his arms. When you’ve got a good grip, you give him a kick to the shin to get him off balance then topple him with a blow to the back of his knee.

You have almost got the situation under control when he lashes out in either a desperate final attack or a misguided attempt to regain his balance. His head smashes hard against the side of your face, knocking your shades into the bridge of your nose hard enough to make you see stars before they slip off completely. They land lens-first on the ground and slide.

Hell fucking no.

You use your weight and your anger to force him all the way down to his knees.

“You did not just fucking do that, monster-dork.”

His anger does a 180 to abject fear the moment he looks into your eyes, no doubt freaking out under your righteous red gaze.

“I am going to make you pay.”

“Holy thit,” he whispers, for the first time actually responding appropriately to your threats. “You’re dead. You’re dead. Oh, fuck.”

You know in an instant that he’s not threatening you back.

 _Oh._

You gasp as the second epiphany hits you, not because you’re hit by a tidal wave of shitty memories again but because this one comes paired with physical reminders. The icy feeling in your head and chest drops to sub-zero temperatures faster than a Lamborghini can go from zero to sixty. There are holes in your chest. Bullet wounds in your chest. Oh, fuck.

You look down at the shirt you weren’t wearing two seconds ago, down through your own flesh. You see parts of yourself that you were never meant to see.

You bring a finger up. It slides through the holes in your chest as easily as the holes in your shirt. It doesn’t hurt, it’s just so fucking cold.

“Oh.”

You stick three more fingers in three more holes. You wonder if it would be ironic to call this “morbid fascination.”

“So, how long have these been here?” you ask without looking up from your chest.

“You didn’t know? How do you forget you’re dead?”

He’s still winded. You’re not surprised. You kind of figured the guy has as much stamina as he does defense. His special fairy princess glow has subsided. His eyes are squinted so much they’re almost shut, but you can tell they’re back to their original white.

“Fuck off, monster-dork. I couldn’t see the massive amount of bullet holes in my chest.”

This is the first time you’ve ever wished something hurt more, not less.

“Maybe it’th juth my own thupidity thpeaking here, but the white, thouleth eyeth would have clued me in.”

“What are you going on about now?”

“I’m juth thuggething that maybe if you didn’t walk around wearing thadeth all the time like thome thmug douthe you would have notithed your dead eyeth and thpared uth all thith trouble,” he says, his voice as strained as it is pissed off. “Or ith that normal for your thpethieth?”

Lippy little bastard.

“What color did you just say my eyes were?”

“You are the motht moronic, obliviouth dead creature I have ever had the mithfortune of being irritated by.”

“You know, you think you could show a little sympathy seeing as I’ve got a chest full of lead. I just figured out I’m dead, monster-dork. Have a little sympathy. I’m all fragile. I could swoon at any second.”

“You’re dead. Get over it.”

He kneads at his forehead and mumbles something you can’t catch.

“An answer would be nice, monster-dork.”

“Your eyeth are white, you inthufferable prick. Cold, dead white. Thatithfied?”

“You mean like yours?”

Monster-dork looks up at you blankly. You swear, this guy goes stupid at the least convenient moments. His mouth works a mile a minute when you want him to shut up, but the moment you ask a question it’s all deflections and dumb stares.

“Ith that a joke?”

You don’t have a mirror. You doubt monster-dork even knows what one is, with that haircut. (You bet his lusus cuts it for him.) But you do have a particularly sharp and shiny sword at your disposal. Monster dork actually flinches as you reequip it.

You take one quick look to confirm that yes, your normally candy red eyes have somehow turned milky white. You can’t say you were particularly fond of your mutant, blood-filled eyes. They (and your silky white skin) made the sunlight your continuous enemy, but at least they were better than this. There was an element of coolness to your albino peepers. Not to mention they had the uncanny ability to freak people the fuck out. But this? “Cold, dead white.” Monster-dork hit the nail on the head with that one.

You flip the sword and hold it out to monster-dork, handle first.

“Yep. Check it out. You’re sporting the same dead white I am. We’re practically blood brothers now.”

His hands are shaking as he takes the sword from you. It plummets abruptly to the ground the moment you let him take the weight. The tip hits and slides across the ground with a ear-piercing skree before he just drops it completely to throw his hands over his ears.

“What’s your problem now? Scared of the truth?”

“Thut up!” he demands. No, begs. His voice is thin and desperate.

You reach down to retrieve your sword. That’s when you notice the thin trails of yellow creeping down monster-dork’s face.

“Shit, dude, you’re leaking,” you say, because it doesn’t take you long to realize that’s his blood color working its way down his nose. That’s not good.

“It’th called tears, jackath,” he snaps.

A little blue firework pops off just left of your face.

“Hey! Watch where you’re throwing those. Do you want to put an end to my modeling career? This baby’s my moneymaker.”

“Would you just thut up FUCK!”

More fireworks pop off unevenly around him. They’re something kind of… off about them. Ignoring for a moment that they’re the psychic fireworks of an alien from a doomed species, you think there’s something a little abnormal about this new display of freakitude. The fireworks look sick somehow. Which sounds stupid, even in your head, but your instincts have been pretty spot on lately.

Captor curls up on himself, pulling his knees tight to his chest. He lowers his head down to press on his knees and mutters something you can’t quite hear.

Aw, shit. He’s not weeping over his lost lusus is he? You seriously did not come prepared to deal with weepy aliens.

“Uh…”

You kneel down, but not too close because proximity to monster-dork has suddenly become a hazard zone.

“I’m sure your lusus is fine. This probably isn’t really your home anyway.”

Alright, so you’re pretty shit at this whole “comforting” business, but you figure that’s close enough to the right thing to say. And you figure giving him a nice, encouraging (yet subtly ironic) pat on the back wouldn’t hurt either.

That’s what you’re thinking right up until the moment that Captor’s hand shoots out like lightening, grabbing yours the moment the tips of your fingers touch down on his bony, black shoulder.

“Jegus fuck—”

How the fuck did he do that? You didn’t even see him move. But you don’t have time to think about that now, not while monster-dork is doing his best to break every fucking finger in your hand. You pull back, but he doesn’t let go. If anything, his grip tightens and he starts screaming in your face like a fucking loon. The little fireworks are popping everywhere. You hold up an arm to shield your eyes. You can feel the sparks stinging your skin even through your sleeves.

“What the fuck is your problem?”

You try and shout over him. You doubt he hears. All that’s left to get through to him is force. You jerk your arm back as hard as you can. No way monster-dork’s stronger than you, even in the midst of a psychobilly freakout. You realize what a stupid idea that was the moment you end up with a lap full of screaming, gray alien space-boy. Goddamn it.

“Get off!”

You find out pretty damn fast that monster-dork is well beyond noticing. The screams have stopped, replaced in a split second with twitchy shakes. Something warm, wet, and bubbly seeps from his mouth down the side of your face. You feel it seep into your hair. Oh fuck no. Your hand finally falls loose of his and you take the opportunity to flip monster-dork off the top of you and down onto the ground.

Fuck. Yep, that is definitely what all the seizures you saw on TV looked like. Only smaller and complete with its very own laser show. Shit, shit, shit, monster-dork! You are not a fucking EMT. You are thirteen years old, and you have no idea how to deal with this shit.

Before you can even consider how you’re going to keep him from biting his own tongue off the seizure stops, and with it goes what you hope is the very last of Captor’s psychic bullshit. There’s yellow foam leaking out of the corner of his mouth. Probably the same stuff that’s currently drying in your hair, which makes you feel mondo unclean. But you stop being disgusted the moment you remind yourself once again that, fuck, that’s the color of his blood. It almost perfectly matches the stupid symbol on his shirt.

Great, now you have to worry that he’s drowning in his own blood on top of everything else.

Only, maybe you don’t. Because both of you are already dead.

Monster-dork coughs out more yellow spit and moans. It is ridiculous how relieved you feel.

“Hey. Hey, Captor. You still with the walking undead here?”

The only reply you get is a grunt you’re not even sure was a response to your words instead of whatever’s going on in monster-dork’s brain right now. His eyes flutter half open to reveal the blank whites underneath. You wonder if it’s because he’s dead or because his eyes have rolled up into his skull.

“Come on, man. Rise and shine. The party’s over.”

His eyes close again. Well, shit.

So now you’re dead. Well, to be fair you were dead all along, but you figure that knowing is at least a step in the right direction. You’re stranded in a place that may or may not be Alternia and may or may not be in the game. As of now, you have no method of obtaining further information on the matter. The only other sentient creature in this whole universe, so far as you can tell, has just passed out post a psychic seizure. He’s already dead according to the law of white eyes, so you figure it’s probably OK not to waste too much brain power worrying over him. Not like it’d do him any good at this point anyway. You are sitting on the roof of an alien boy’s house with nowhere to go and nothing to do but contemplate that somewhere out there your friends are still in danger. If they’re even still alive.

What will you do?


	6. Chapter 6

Obviously the first thing you’re going to do is to pick up your shades from where they plunged to the ground. Your poor babies are still sitting lens-down. You suppose you should feel lucky that they didn’t get completely crushed during monster-dork’s freak out, but you can’t help but to cringe when you see the crisscross of scratches now decorating the center of each lens.

There’s no way you can wear these. Those scratches will irritate the living shit out of you, plus you’ll look like a complete moron. You capchalogue your fallen comrade. Monster-dork better have some sort of magical, glass-repairing alien technology tucked away somewhere in all of his shit, because if not, once the little bastard’s conscious you are seriously going to make him pay.

Now what will you do?

The answer, it appears, is to get saved by the magical deus ex machina. The exposition fairy, in a ridiculously fucking literal interpretation of a phrase best left to the realm of Lalonde’s wizard slash. This should never, ever happen in real life. Especially not in your own life. This is so uncool.

“Oh, dear. What happened here?”

Lo and behold! You feast your eyes upon the delicate wings, the curving horns, and the elegant, godly, crimson attire of the plot fairy, come to unravel these crazy shenanigans in which you and monster-dork have painfully entwined yourselves.

“Dave Strider,” you introduce yourself.

You hold out your hand, and she takes it without hesitation.

“I know.”

“Do you know him too?”

“Yes! He’s a dear friend.”

“Of course he is.”

Her eyes aren’t white, they’re yellow and black. She’s not dead, she’s just another troll. Because you just can’t get enough of these fucking trolls.

“So, you going to introduce yourself or just stand there smiling like a third grader on picture day? I know it’s quite a show we’ve got going on here, being a couple of walking corpses and all, but we don’t like impromptu performances. Buy a ticket or go find somebody else to gawk at.”

“Would you prefer payment in boonbucks?”

“Jegus, fuck that. Do you know how many boonbucks I have already? I corner the goddamn market in boonbucks. Literally. I made a goddamned killing in the LOHAC stock exchange.”

“I remember.”

“Of course you do. So, which one are you? Did you type in the same color you’re wearing, or is that just monster-dork’s deal?”

“Monster-dork?”

You jerk your thumb over towards Captor.

“You shouldn’t call him that. He’s surprisingly sensitive sometimes,” she admonishes you, still wearing that creepy-as-fuck smile. “Has he not told you his name?”

She kneels down beside Captor and brushes his hair out of his eyes gently, careful of his horns.

“He said it was Captor. Or something like that. I may not have been giving him my full attention.”

“It’s Sollux Captor, to be perfectly precise.”

“Which he’ll never tell me himself because he can’t say it. Jegus, and I didn’t think it was possible for monster-dork to be more pathetic than he already was. Lady, you have made me a believer.”

It’s not until the exposition-fairy’s lips quirk that you realize what you’ve just stepped in.

“Damn it, that’s not what I meant.”

“Of course not.”

“Humans don’t do your species fucked up pity thing.”

“I know.”

“Pity isn’t a good thing. I was not… Look at him. He’s drooling, for fuck’s sake. I am not craving a slice of the crazy-cake.”

“Of course you weren’t, Dave.”

“You gonna tell me your name or not, fairy-chick?”

“It’s Aradia. Don’t bother trying to recall it. We’ve never met.”

“You mean you never bothered trolling me? And here I fancied myself Mr. Popularity.”

“Not once! I was slightly dead at the time that my friends were communicating with you.”

“Slightly dead?”

“As in slightly less dead than you are now.”

“Do I want to know how that works?”

“I doubt you’d enjoy being bored with the details. Leave that to Alpha Dave.”

“I’m not Alpha Dave?”

“Not anymore.”

You can’t decide whether that’s a relief or yet another disappointing revelation. You resolve not to give a shit. It doesn’t change anything. You’re not just going to sit back and relax just because you’re not Dave numero uno anymore. And it doesn’t make your quest to get the fuck out of Houston-Alternia-fucked-up-afterlife-Dodge any less pressing.

“So, what brings you to our little slice of heaven? Don’t tell me you’re just here to poke fun at the dead kids.”

“I can’t stay for much longer. Pressing matters on the other side. I’m sure you understand.”

“Naturally.”

“I’m actually going to be meeting your Alpha self soon.”

“No shit? Yeah, I think I remember hearing Karkat spew out some nonsense to that effect. I’d say it’s a shame I missed out on the interspecies party, but apparently my afterlife is full of trolls. All this place is missing is a little blind girl up in my grill and some sweet beats to really bring this place to life. Figuratively speaking, of course.”

“Don’t feel too lonely. I believe at this point that each player from both our sessions has died at least once. You’re quite some distance from the others currently, but on the bright side your bubble has merged quite nicely with Sollux’s. I’m sure the two of you will be able to keep each other company in the meantime.”

“Back that up and run it by me one more time. We’re where exactly?”

“The details are a little bit time consuming. As I previously mentioned, despite being the Maid of Time I don’t have the time for a lengthy conversation at the moment. But the short version is that you are here,” she holds up her right index finger, “and the others are here,” she finishes, raising her left hand to indicate a point maybe a foot and a half away from the right.

“Well, thanks for clearing that one up.”

“My pleasure,” she says with that smile that’s really starting to freak you the fuck out.

You know the trolls are capable of understanding sarcasm, but you honestly can’t tell if this chick is just so in on the joke that she’s managing to keep the upper hand or if she really is that goddamn genuine.

“The key details I’d like to impress upon you before I leave are this: It’s impossible to become any deader than you already are and it is equally impossible for you to leave this place. The best course of action available to you currently is to simply relax and wait for your bubbles to join the others. Then you can have that party you were talking about earlier. Any questions?”

“Only a metric ton.”

“I think three questions are more than enough at this juncture.”

“I see you take this fairy bullshit seriously.”

“You’re lucky Sollux is asleep or I would have made it two.”

“Lucky me.”

“Time’s wasting, Dave.”

The trouble with narrowing down your queries is that you’re dead. You’re dead and there’s really nothing you can do to change that. And according to the fairy-chick, there’s no escaping this place, wherever the hell this is. That pretty much throws a wrench in all of your post-life goals. What you want you can’t get. Even if there is some kind of magic loophole out of this afterhell, you’re certain that she’s not going to be the one to help you find it. In short, no question you could ask would help you become less dead or less stuck. Knowing that, what’s left to ask?

“Should I be concerned about monster-dork? I know he’s dead, but… You know, for future reference. Since apparently we’re going to be stuck together for an indefinite amount of time, psychic seizure prevention awareness would be nice.”

“Perhaps with a side of psionic sensitivity training as well.”

“Fine. Sollux. I solemnly vow to only call him monster-dork when the situation desperately calls for it. Now do I get an answer or not, fairy-troll?”

She looks down at monster-dork again. There is totally something going on there. You just have no idea what. Your first instinct says that these two are old flames (old for thirteen year olds, anyway), but there’s something too… gentle about it? Maybe brother and sister, you consider. But trolls don’t do the whole normal family thing.

“The best thing you can do for him now is to let him rest. He’ll recover soon enough. He just has a bad habit of spreading his mind too thin. In the future, perhaps you could convince him to relax a bit instead of riling him up.”

“Hey, this was not my fault. Monst— _Sollux_ went on a rampage all by himself. I am the innocent bystander here.”

“Question number two?”

“Shit… Alright, I’ve got one. Is there any way to speed up the process of getting from point A to point B?”

Getting in contact with someone less useless than monster-dork and less creepy that the exposition-fairy is the next best thing you can think of to getting out of here.

“The bubbles tend to remain stagnant while the party, or in this case parties, inside are unaware of their own death. Now that you’re aware of your own doom, your bubble will naturally gravitate towards the others. To be honest, I’m not quite sure why. Conversing with the horrorterrors was never a talent I possessed. You’d have to discuss that with another, assuming you’re truly interested in the answer.”

“You caught me. I don’t give a shit.”

“Final question?”

You’re pretty sure you haven’t learned a single useful thing so far. It’s time to get clever.

“If there was one tip you could give me for surviving this complete and utter horseshit, what would it be?”

“That one’s easy,” she says, rising up into the air with the gentle fluttering of her huge-ass butterfly wings. “Give him a chance. I’m sure he’ll surprise you.”

And with those final words of infinite wisdom, she’s gone, poofed up into the Alternian night sky with a blue space-warp effect that would have looked right at home in any 80’s sci-fi B-movie.

“That,” you say, half to monster-dork and half to the endless space you know is lurking just beyond what you can see, “was incredibly fucking useless.”


	7. Chapter 7

The first thing you’re aware of is how everything feels completely fucked up and completely normal at the same time.

This is how every day has begun for you for as long as you can remember, thanks to your mutations. Ever since you were a little grub, you’ve always hated hearing the other kids talk about their happy little dreams where they got to grow wings and fly or be one of the empress’ hand-picked soldiers. You don’t get dreams like that. Never have.

You are a psychic mutant, doomed with vision two-fold. And it is a real pain in the ass. You spend most of your days trying with ever-increasing futility to ignore the incessant voices in your head. You don’t get a moment’s respite from the constant screams of terror and rage, the insane justifications of those facing death and filled with rage. Not even in your sleep. No, then the voices are at their loudest, combined with the dark, dreaming thoughts that plague all of your species. You’ve always been of the opinion that the nightly rages were wriggler’s play compared to the grim visions of the doom of your entire species. You were even well-known back in the days of your communal school-feedings to psychically assault those who complained and/or bragged about how bad they thought they had it. That was how you met Feferi and Eridan, actually. You killed enough of your fellow students to draw the attention of royalty.

Of course, you were nothing if not a disappointment to them. You failed to live up to your reputation. You weren’t a lethal psychic killer, just a pathetic little wriggler who lashed out at everyone and everything in between spending days at a time cowering in the bottom of your recuperacoon wishing that for once your head really would explode and put you out of your misery instead of just threatening to. That’s not what they wanted from you. That’s not what anybody in your whole goddamn universe wanted from you, _including_ you. Eridan wanted you as a tool, something to do his dirty work and to hone his non-existent skills against. For the longest time, you thought that was what Feferi wanted from you too. But really all she wanted was to try and help you. As much as she could, being the heir-apparent and that hipster douchenozzle’s moirail. But still, she had tried. And you’d just thrown it back in her face at every turn, either thinking that you were such hot shit that even the empress-to-be wasn’t as smart as you or that you were too much of a pathetic waste of space for someone of such a high blood color to be wasting their time on.

For a prophet (even a prophet of doom), you sure have spent a lot of time fucking your life up. And as you pull yourself up out of a pool of your own spit, vomit, and blood, you wonder just what you’ve fucked up this time.

The voices in your head fade back to their normal, dull roar as you attempt to put all of your little pieces back together. The final bits of your dreaming visions nag insistently at you even as they drip away. You struggle to sort the past from the future, the memories from the prophesies, to figure out how the fuck you got here. Here being the roof of your communal hive stem.

You spit out a disgustingly large wad of snot, blood, and unidentifiable grit, hoping it will do even a little to alleviate the taste in your mouth. It does, but not in the way you expect. The nerves in your tongue (which had previously been a throbbing mess) readily inform you that you’ve recently bit the ever-loving fuck out of your bifurcated tongue. And you just re-opened the wound, if the suffocating, metallic taste flooding your mouth is anything to go by.

You bend over, letting the blood dribble out of your mouth more than spitting it out to try and spare your offended nerve endings. While you’re stuck waiting for the yellow flow to ebb, you take account of your other injuries.

Your head hurts, but when doesn’t it? The tenderness across your scalp when you run your hands through your hair is worth noting, though. You guess you probably hit your head when you passed out. The rest of you is generally fine. A few minor aches and pains, but nothing to go crying to your lusus about. Most importantly, you aren’t starving and your wrists aren’t aching. Your nails are bitten down like they normally are, but not to the point of bleeding. Also worth noting.

This is how you get it back. You take the facts, add them up, and figure out how you ended up once again face-down and half-dead.

The bite on your tongue together with the bruise on your head indicates you had another one of your fits. Those are pretty rare, usually only a handful a sweep. But the remaining facts suggest that this one actually wasn’t caused by your self-destructive habits.

When you’re feeling unbalanced towards what you think of as “the blue,” you generally don’t eat much in a vaguely intentional way. You also generally don’t move much. When you’re more towards “the red,” you tend more to simply forget to eat. Or to just keep putting it off and putting it off until your survival instincts kick in and remind you very logically that if you pass out you’ll lose a lot more work time than it takes to shove some sustenance down your protein chute. It’s possible that you could have eaten just before you passed out and still have been in the red (sleep being another one of those things that you just keep putting off), but given that your nails aren’t bitten and your wrists and fingers don’t ache, you find it unlikely.

You keep your nails short, unlike most trolls who actually enjoy the claw-like quality of fully-grown nails. To you, long nails are nothing short of a hindrance. Some trolls swear that the usefulness of pointed nails in handling delicate electronics (including the art of carving electro-neural pathways into the walls of your silicone mainframes without the use of typical and so-called by certain “hardcore” idiots roughly on par with KK in terms of ability “pedestrian” tools) outweighs the speed lost and the aggravation of learning to type without accidentally impaling your keyboard. You have never been particularly convinced by the argument. You are of the opinion that the only people who have long nails are morons who still think looking dangerous is cool and more important that actually being dangerous.

So, point being: your nails are currently short, but not the over-bitten, bloody stubs you wind up with during a red phase. And if you’d actually been in the red, your wrists and fingers would be aching from the endless amounts of work you would have been doing right up to the point where you passed out. Add all the evidence together and the conclusion is clear. You did not have one of your stupid seizures thanks to your fucking emotional imbalances, which leaves only one option: sheer and total mental overexertion.

Your seizures are rare, but ones caused by overexertion are rare even among those. In fact, you haven’t overexerted yourself once since you were about four-sweeps old. That day was the last day you ever attended communal school-feedings. You didn’t give a shit what the drones thought about your absence, you were not going back after that. You are certain that the other kids would have culled you if you hadn’t let out a subconscious burst of psionics at the first stab. Whatever. You were smarter than your so-called educators anyway.

Six-sweeps old and you still don’t know your limits. Fucking great. Four-sweep old you would be ashamed if he could see you now. He probably should be.

You drool out the last of your blood and wipe your mouth. Now that you’ve analyzed your injuries, it’s time to move on to your surroundings. What were you doing on your roof that caused you to spread your mind so thin?

You figure out fairly quickly that your vision isn’t doubled because of your injuries, but because your glasses are laying a couple of feet away. You retrieve them and set yourself to analyzing your surroundings for real.

You don’t even have the energy to run when you notice what no-doubt set you off earlier.

He’s gone. Your lusus is gone.

You go over the implications of the empty chain and collar as you drag your body towards his posts. He couldn’t have left on his own, and he’s too stupid to survive in the wild. He couldn’t have survived the fall. Maybe he couldn’t have survived at all, under any imaginable scenario. The only thing that vaguely reassures you is the lack of blood on the ground, but in its place is something much more unsettling.

You kick the empty collar out of the way to read the words carved into the roof:

your lusus is fine dont worry

It takes you a minute (several panicking minutes, in fact) to realize that the message isn’t written in Alternian. The letters are thin and straight where they aren’t perfectly curved, like sticks thrown together among squiggling grubs. Besides various coding languages, Alternian is the only actual language you know. Who the hell could have written this and why can you read it?

You don’t feel safe staying up here while you ponder over it, not when you’re so weak. You don’t want to, but you’ve got to leave the alien message alone and get back inside.

As you limp back down to your hive, you get the distinct feeling that nowhere is safe, nowhere is sacred. Which is probably the appropriate thing to feel, given that you’re too tired for rage and your goddamn lusus is missing. What could anyone possibly want with your twice retarded biclops-dad anyway? In terms of lusi worth hunting down and orphaning a young troll for, yours barely has sentimental value. You even have severe doubts as to whether or not he’d taste good. Size and power are all he’s got going for him, and by that metric he’s still rendered virtually useless by his massive lack of intelligence.

No matter which way your exhausted, psychically beaten down brain slices it, the only one who should want your lusus is you. And right now you want him real bad.

Your hive feels wrong, even if everything looks to be exactly in its place.  The voices in your head are screaming, a whole chorus of them. Before you can force them back to the space in your mind that you reserve for unimportant bullshit, the voices are all wiped out by something infinitely larger. It sounds like a low, dark hum and endless, blank spaces, like something so loud you can’t hear it. And maybe just a little bit like the end of the world. It makes you want to give up and sleep inside of the void it makes.

Which is really fucking weird. And you know weird. You are pretty much the fucking Hero of Weird Bullshit. In fact, you would be willing to bet that if some arbitrary greater power in the universe were to give you a title, it would be more or less exactly synonymous with that.

Of course, as the Hero of Weird Bullshit, you have a long-standing standard of ignoring anything and everything which you so much as even suspect isn’t currently in this plane of existence. This has proven to be an invaluable standard over the years. It is probably the only reason you are still alive. And also relatively sane. As such, you are obligated to ignore the not-sound, regardless of how inviting it is.

Your limbs feel like limp noodles. You begrudgingly remember that the first time KK ever saw you in person he said your limbs looked like noodles. He said you had pasty-gray pasta arms, and then the insufferable prick laughed. Or did he? No, fuck, wait, _you_ laughed at him for… something. Fuck, what was it? You laughed at him, but he didn’t laugh at you because he needed you not to be a scrawny little grub. He needed help, and it still hadn’t sunk in to his shallow think pan that as a high-level Psionic you were one of the deadliest fighters on the team.

Team? What—

You are so busy strolling down memory lane like a chump asshole that you and your scrawny, noodle limbs miss a step completely. You tumble down the stairs in what would no doubt be seen by an outsider as a piece of pure slap-stick genius, but from your perspective it’s just another miserable aspect of life as Sollux Captor. It is only thanks to a backwards burst of psionics that you keep from smashing your think pan out on the wall down below. Lousy stupid goddamn stairs.

You are rewarded by your think pan, being the ever-gracious little shit that it is, for your pan-saving last-minute psionics by a dizzying strike of pain right between your eyes. FUCK.

You shuffle out into the hallway, planning to make a bee-line to your room. You are half-way there when your eyes catch something out of place down at the far end of the hallway.

There is a door, a white door, that shouldn’t be there. A door that is definitely in this plane of existence. A door that, if you recall correctly, should lead into thin air and a long, long drop down.

An impossibly missing lusus and a door that shouldn’t exist. You can’t help but to feel that the two events have something in common. You think you should probably check this out.

Maybe.

You just…

Really don’t fucking feel like it. For some stupid reason. Logic says that feelings are bullshit and you should be checking out that door like fifteen minutes ago, but every non-rational part of you is saying that you should just crawl your beaten, scrawny ass into your recuperacoon and stay there until you can at least levitate a pencil without injuring yourself. Wait, maybe both of those impulses are logical. Lousy stupid goddamn bifurcated thought processes.

The first logic (you think of that one as the red one, just for simplicity’s sake), adds that it’s really fucking stupid to sleep when something already exhausted you to the point of seizure and stole your impossible to steal lusus, and when that something probably has an unprotected door leading directly to your hive. You might as well invite it to crawl into your recuperacoon with you. You could take the blue side, and it could take the red.

Fuck, but you need to stop talking to yourself. The voices in your head are bad enough without adding your own.

Red wins. Game over. You are going to check out that door. End of discussion.

You hug the wall for support the closer you travel towards the door. Not so much because you actually need the support. More like you just want the support. The stupid blue logic won’t shut up, only now it’s whimpering to your blood pusher instead of arguing with your brain. You push against the wall like you’re begging for it to collapse or just swallow your whole, anything to keep you from having to take another step forward.

You’re scared, you belatedly realize. You are downright terrified of this stupid door.

You have to let the wall go where the hallway splits into two opposing corridors, one with a red door at the end and a blue at the other. And stuck here in the middle is the white door. You do your best to shut the blue side of you up with the rest of the voices and push forward. You are not going to be this guy. You are not going to be the troll who ran in fear of a fucking door. That’s just too pathetic, even for you.

A high-pitched whine joins in the not-noise as you reach a hand out towards the door’s knob. The void in your head takes on a sudden gravity, violently shivering and sucking inward on your skull with an insane amount of pressure. And in the middle of it all, there’s a voice screaming. Loud. Louder than you thought the voices could get. It sounds so close and so real. And so familiar. Familiar because, you realize with sudden terror, the voice is yours. Only it’s not, because you can’t even breathe right now, much less scream. What you are hearing is a prophesy of your own doom. It’s the final sound you make before you die. And it’s so close you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between your voice and it if you could only get enough air to scream.

Self-preservation kicks in and you’re gone, moving faster than you’ve ever moved in your life.

By the time you’re curled up and gasping at the bottom of your recuperacoon, you can’t remember how you got there. You vaguely remember throwing everything in sight at your bedroom door, and only that because of the amount of strain it put on your already exhausted mind. Everything else is a panicked blur.

You curl up into as small and tight a ball as you can, alternatively swearing as loud as your voice will go at the splitting ache in your head and holding your hands tight over your mouth to silence the noise of your shuddering breaths.

It takes what feels like forever, but the fear slowly fades into something you can swallow down like the nightly rages and the prophetic visions. The last thought you have before you pass out, your aching head having finally given you some small respite and the voices having dulled down to white noise, is that if you are alive in the morning it will truly be a miracle.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dave plays doctor. (I hope Sollux is a lefty!) ;D

Your name is Sollux Captor, and you wake up feeling…

Actually, you feel pretty good. Which isn’t exactly normal for you. You spend half a second wondering what the fuck is _wrong_ before you realize how incredibly stupid that is. ‘Don’t look a gift musclebeast in the mouth,’ or whatever archaic highblood saying is appropriate to boil your pathetic life down into bite-sized quips.

You crawl out of your recuperacoon, hacking out what sopor slime there is left in your lungs. Red splotches fall down onto the blue side. It looks like wax, like blood.

You rub sopor out of your eyes lazily. Like blood? There’s no such thing as a redblood. Yet, your sleep-addled mind insists there is. Maybe you dreamed it? Who knows. Maybe it was one of those crazy assholes gibbering to you in your sleep again. There never come as clearly to you as they do to Aradia (which you tend to attribute to hers being dead and not in the process of dying), but sometimes they get their message across. Their fucking insane otherworldly and wholly irrelevant messages.

But that’s not important right now. Redbloods are definitely not in this plane of existence, and (more importantly) you have only two million other things to be doing right now that far outrank moderately prophetic dream thoughts on your give-a-shit-o-meter. For instance, those red, sopory-phlegm drops may have just solved a coding problem you have been working on for perigees. Or maybe you solved it in your sleep. Whatever. You need to get this down in code before you forget it.

You spend exactly as much time in your ablution chamber as it takes to wash the sopor off an acceptable percentage of your body. Most of your time is spent on your hands. Your hair is severely neglected. You wish someone would invent a faster method of cleansing away sopor slime. You tried forgoing your recuperacoon completely once. You made it four days. Never again. After that, you tried a combination of ingested supor to help you sleep and a dash of mind honey to wake you up. Never, ever again.

You are back at your computer as fast as a combination of pisonics and what little athletic ability exists in your narrow limbs can get you there. Wait two seconds. Back at your computer? When did you leave? For that matter, when did you start coding in the first place? And when did you finish?

While you’re pondering those highly important time-space queries, your hand moves. Code begins compiling, and before you can even realize what a huge mistake you’ve made, the game grub which you had been working on begins to ooze something putrid-smelling and alarmingly acidic. It is roughly the same color that a pail full of your genetic material would be if you decided to go flushed with a rust blood. Or a red blood.

Why the fuck are you thinking about pails at a time like this?! You drag your stubby nails down your face as a drop slips through your psionic containment field and onto a highly vital storage grub that has only been sleeping under your computer for the past sweep and a half. You momentarily contemplate burying your face in the corrosive effluence. It would be less painful and far less tedious than the literal perigees it will take you to get your shit back in working order if you just damaged a single vital data sac in that grub.

As you’re not quite ready to write the grub (and yourself by extension) off just yet, you settle for flinging the game grub you just royally fucked over and its vile ooze out the window. You are so furious with yourself that you don’t even bother to see which of your irritating stem neighbors it fell on. You hope it was the troll who lives directly below you. You doubt you are that lucky.

You want to check on your damaged storage grub, but your computer’s self-preservation programs have started kicking in. The spiteful message you coded just to mock yourself is flashing across the black screen: “You are the unchallenged authority of apiculture networking. It is you.” You wish you could say that you had at least intended the message as a pick-me-up.

You launch a half-rotted plate of food off your computer desk with such force that it actually flashes white a nanosecond before impact with the far wall. Congratulations, Captor. Another stunning display of genius. Now every worker in your mainframe is wide awake and frantic. That is really going to speed the recovery process along.

You snap your fingers, and the stirring bees fall like rocks. Very small, purple rocks. Your computer is now effectively in sleep mode. It will be hours before it lets you touch its code again, if not a matter of days. You fail to give a single shit. Except for how you still really feel like smashing your head against a wall until the stupid leaks out. You have effectively ruled out any means of fixing the mess you just created. Without your computer, there is basically fuck all you can do in general. Fuck all that’s important, anyway. That sentence makes absolutely no sense. You hate yourself for that too.

So, what will you do, genius?

You spend another good five minutes surveying the damage in stubborn frustration before turning to the only possible means of distraction left at your disposal: Trollian. Maybe you’ll troll KK. He has a surprising talent for reminding you that you really don’t hate yourself quite as much as he does. As much as he hates himself. That’s what you meant. You think?

Your fingers drum staccato on the edge of your husktop. You’d forgotten just how excruciatingly slow portable technology is. You try to count the seconds it takes to boot up, just to quantify exactly how much of your time it is wasting (in other words, how much of your own time you’re wasting). You’re counting as fast as your fingers are drumming long before the irritating start-up chime sounds.

You try futilely to get into your dead computer remotely, but (as you were already well aware) there is nothing you can do while your computer is down. The attempt does, however, allow you to relax a bit in your defeat. You give up, and open Trollian.

Your computer explodes with lights and noise the moment the program loads. The names in your trollslum flash online and offline, each to its own schizophrenic rhythm. There’s a sound paired with each abortive log-in. Two sounds, to be precise: the “begin trolling” and “cease trolling” chimes. On and off and on and off, in time with each flash and abscond in your trollslum. In time with _each_ flash. They’re echoing, one on top of the other. That shouldn’t be possible. That isn’t possible. You’d know if it were.

There’s another sound, underneath the Trollian cacophony. At first it’s so faint you think you’re imagining it, but in an instant it’s overtaken the noise coming from Trollian. They’re screaming. Everyone’s screaming. Some as they choke on their own and others in fear before they’re finally cut down.  Fuck, not this again.

“Shut up,” you hiss through clenched teeth. You can’t tell if you’ve got your eyes shut or if the voices are so loud that they’re blocking out every other sense. “FUCK OFF!”

Another noise now, coming closer. Like a single heartbeat, a black pulse through the universe. A sound so loud you can’t hear it. A sound like the end of the world.

And it all goes black.

Your name is Sollux Captor, and there is a hand on your arm. Your other arm is currently on fire.

What will you do?

“I’d love to let you burn to death,” a voice grunts in your direction, “but the smell is really starting to make me sick. Have some courtesy for your neighbor, would you?”

You decide (or, more accurately, your body decides) that screaming is the best possible thing you could be doing as something green and possibly made of felt clamps down across your burning arm. You try to throw the fabric off and quickly discover how strong the white arms holding yours down are.

“Hold still for one goddamn second, would you? Unless your purpose in life actually is to be the biggest pain in my ass you could possibly be, in which case go right ahead.”

“My arm is on fire!”

“Glad to see you finally caught on,” the voice says, still straining to restrain you.

“Fuck!” This really hurts. “Shit! Fuck!”

“Think maybe you could put some of that flailing to good use and kick whatever that used to be away before we both go up in smoke?”

You catch sight of your burning husktop before the voice can even finish his request. You scream again. Thankfully, you also launch the whole flaming mess into one of your beehive mainframes. The fire is quickly doused by mind honey and the charred corpses of binary bees.

“What the fuck happened?”

“That’s what I’d like to know. There I was minding my own business, playing doctor with some smuppets, when my good buddy Sollux decides to roast himself alive.”

You finally turn to face the owner of the white arms and irritatingly calm voice.

“Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for a good old fashioned barbeque. But didn’t your lusus ever teach you real men cook outdoors?”

You have no idea what the fuck you’re looking at. White like a lusus, but shaped like a troll. A hornless, fangless troll. A disturbingly troll-esque lusus? You cannot even comprehend the monster in front of you. It talks. It _snarks_ , of all the fucking things. Your mind goes blank, like it just gives up trying to comprehend so many incomprehensible things at once.

“Now come on,” the monster says, pulling you to your feet. “Let’s go get a bucket before you manage to ruin another one of my outfits.”

That was it. That was the moment your brain actually snapped in two.

You babble something vaguely incoherent before tripping over your own feet in your scuttle backwards. Not only do you fall hard on your ass, painfully jostling your felt-cocooned arm, you also manage to bash your horns hard against the bottom of your recuperacoon. FUCK.

“For fuck’s sake! ...oh, right,” the monster laughs dryly. “Buckets. That’s some grade-A humor right there. Real slapstick comedy. You’d think that one day we’d learn, but no. What kind of universe would it be if we weren’t constantly being as culturally insensitive as possible?”

OK, you are pretty sure less than half of that made sense. Or maybe you just hit your head too hard. You flinch back when he reaches for you, but he’s only offering you a hand up. You’re not sure you want to take it.

“I just meant let’s put the fucking fire out. Is that alright with you, monster-dork?”

The small smile he gives you when you accept his hand is anything but reassuring. You think this is mostly due to the hundred different reflections of your own stupefied face in the busted lens of his sunglasses. Then again, it could just be the fact that the fucking _monster_ in front of you is wearing sunglasses at all.

In spite of your misgivings, you let the monster pull you to your feet. You really don’t have much choice in the matter once his fingers lock down on your wrist.

“Liquid containment device, monster-dork. We need one, in case you hadn’t noticed,” the monster gripes when you don’t immediately follow him. “I mean, unless you’d really like to sit around dumbly while everything else in here goes up in flames.”

“What?” you ask dumbly.

It doesn’t take you long to find the source of his agitation: your curtains are on fire. The red half of your curtains, to be exact. Must have happened when you threw your computer into your mainframe. Another testament to your quick thinking.

You quench the fire with psionics while the monster’s explaining, once again, and in slow, snarky terms, that your hive is in fact on fire.

“Has anybody ever told you that you are the most inconvenient creature in existence? I know I can’t be the first,” the monster snaps. “Of course you could have put out the fire any goddamn second you chose. Fuck this.”

The monster shoves its hands into its pockets. You marvel once again at its incredibly troll-like demeanor. Then you remember your arm was recently on fire. You peak under the green felt. What you see is not pretty and rather strongly indicates you should be in severe amounts of pain.

“Where are you going?” you ask when the monster starts heading out your door.

“Where the do you think I’m going?” he snarls, pausing to glare at you with his half-broken shades. “Oh, that’s right, you don’t fucking think, do you monster-dork?”

What is with this guy? Seriously, what the fuck did you ever do to him? While you’re gaping open-mouthed at his blatant hostility (and, you know, every other thing that’s happened in the past two minutes), you lose your grip on the felt bundle in your arms. It slips down to the ground, revealing the decimated flesh underneath.

“Holy shit,” the monster says, sounding far more interested than you’d really like anyone to sound about this much physical damage to your person. “Can you feel that?”

“No,” you reply, doing your best to avoid looking at your arm.

It’s probably not that surprising that you don’t feel much, on second thought. There’s not that much left to feel. Your arm looks like it was roasted, not just flash-scorched. You really don’t like this line of thought.

“Oh fuck. Sorry. You didn’t feel that either, did you? Don’t worry. I’m sure it’ll grow back.”

While you were trying really, really hard not to look at your arm, the monster sauntered over to have a good look. And touch, if your suddenly missing thumb is any indication.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” you snap. “Don’t fucking touch it!”

You jerk away from the monster, and in the process lose another two fingers as they brush against your leg.

“Ha ha. Serves you right,” he mocks. You cannot decide whether the appropriate response to this situation is to hyperventilate or rip this prick’s head off.

“So, why’d you set yourself on fire anyway? Finally get sick of waiting?”

“No.” Waiting? “I didn’t set myself on fire.”

“Oh yeah? What were you doing, then?”

“I…”

You were… you were at your husktop. Well, obviously, genius. But what were you doing? Your memory’s not gone. You can remember everything, from your schoolfeeding days to your sixth wriggling day. So why can’t you remember what you were doing when your husktop exploded?

“Who are you?” it finally dawns on you to ask. This is the perfect distraction.

You swear the monster’s eyes actually roll behind his shades.

“God, you’re boring.”

“Answer the question before I rip off one of your limbs,” you threaten, levitating the monster to drive the point home.

“Go ahead. I’ve seen this trick before too.”

You slam the monster up against your ceiling as hard as you can, which isn’t anywhere near as hard as you _should_ be able to.

“Tell me who the fuck you are and what the fuck you’re doing in my hive!”

He at least has the decency to look irritated. What you can only assume is blood drips down from his white hairline and onto your floor. It falls down on the back of a blue gamegrub. Red drops on blue. Red blood. From this morning? That’s not right…

“You already know who I am,” the monster replies, licking at the blood at it drips close to his lips.

“If I knew who you were, why would I bother asking?” you shout, dangerously close to losing your temper. Your head hurts. It’s actually funny how much it hurts. Here you are with a couple of scorched bones for an arm, and your head is practically killing you.

The monster just laughs.

“If I knew the answer to that,” he says, “I wouldn’t be here.”


	9. Chapter 9

Your name is Dave Strider, and you have nary a fucking clue what to do now. You are (still) standing on the roof of a dead troll’s fugly green skyscraper beehive, and said dead troll is (still) unconscious. You are (still) dead and (still) without any clear means of becoming any less dead or doing anything significant with the theoretically infinite amount of time on your hands.

So, what will you do?

You know, you are getting really sick of that question. You have been futilely pondering that aggravating query for, like, the past perigee. Whatever bullshit amount of time a perigee corresponds to in plain English, you are 100% convinced it perfectly quantifies the amount of time you have spent staring at an unconscious monster-dork and wondering exactly what it is you should be doing to save the day.

The best idea you have come up with is to try and make (what was his first name again?) as comfortable as possible. After all, the magical fairy chick basically said he wasn’t going to re-die or some shit, meaning you don’t have to worry about doing anything that would actually be productive. Not that there was much of anything you could have done in the first place.

“Captor,” you call, nudging at a scrawny, gray arm with the toe of your shoe. “Sollux. Sollux Captor, this is Houston calling. Do you copy? I repeat, do you copy?”

Yep. Just as you figured. Monster-dork is pretty much dead to the world. (No pun intended.)

Fuck it, you decide. Maybe there’s not much you can do, but at least it’s better than sitting around here.

You have no idea how long it takes for you to track back down to your room. Not enough time, that’s for certain, even with the sudden addition of your kitchen and living room to your half of the negaverse. (You are so far beyond questioning it at this point.) You walk around the room, randomly captchaloguing anything that catches your eye along with the shit you actually came for.

Your good buddy monster-dork hasn’t moved so much as a bullshit troll equivalent of an inch in the time you’ve been gone. You were honestly expecting him to be (relatively) alive and kicking by now, just to spite your efforts.

You dump your recently acquired booty on the ground next to his prostrate re-inanimate corpse. It makes a small pile, despite how long you spent trying to find more shit to add. Dumping everything here wasn’t part of the plan. But then, the plan really isn’t much of a plan anymore.

Sitting here, staring at your afterworldly possessions (This is everything you are going to have for eternity. This is eternally _everything_.) and your new best friend forever (And you really fucking mean forever. Holy shit. Forever is a really fucking long time. You never thought of that before.), you aren’t sure if you’ve forgotten the next steps of your master plan or if there never were any other steps. You’re having trouble thinking in general. Well, except for a pretty poignant fixation on the fact that you’re fucking DEAD. Dead, dead, dead. Yep. That sure is a thing you are. Dead. Dead Dave. You. You are the Dead Dave. Well, maybe not THE Dead Dave. After all, lots of Dead Daves out there. No one knows that better than you. (Except maybe the other Dead Daves. Who the fuck knows what they know? Not you. You’re pretty fucking insignificant. Just one little fractional timeline. One tiny corner of what could have been. One section of time that never was.) But you’re A Dead Dave, at least. That’s what’s important here. Right?

No, that’s not fucking right.

You rub at your aching eyes until you see blurry fireworks and try to focus. OK, you were doing what now? You stare at the meaningless pile of crap in front of you and try to remember how this was supposed to go. Steps, Strider. There were steps to accomplish here before you wandered off to the Land of La-La’s and Bullshit.

You carefully slip your pillow under Sollux’s head, but only after you’ve taken the time to wipe the numerous yellow oozings off his face. Alien sweat and hair grease you figure will wash out easily enough, but you’re not taking the chance of that organic blood-dye being permanent. You even take off his 3D goggles and captchalogue them so they (unlike your own shades) will remain intact and unscathed. Then you toss your bed sheet haphazardly over your patient.

Congratulations, Nurse Strider, on having officially accomplished jack shit!

A wave of futile frustration rises like bile in the back of your throat. It tastes like hopelessness with a dash of screaming. You reflexively swallow it back down. Come on, Strider. Get a hold of yourself. What would Bro think if he could see you now? He’d probably kick your ass for being such a useless little shit.

Berating yourself is great for passing the time and all, but it’s really not helping the situation any. What you should be asking yourself is what Bro would _do_ right now, not what he’d think.

Unfortunately, the latter is a lot easier to answer than the former. You’ve got plenty of frames of reference when it comes to Bro beating a little stoicism into you, but nothing comes to mind on how to deal with aliens or seizures or being dead.

Come on, Dave. What would Bro do if he was here? Your mind cycles through a bare dozen scenarios, most of which involve either strifing with the fairy chick until he got some straight answers or having the guts to jump off the roof and find out what’s really at the edge of the afterlife. Or hell, even having the guts to leave the deadweight behind and take the fucking stairs.

 Finding the afterlife chick is obviously no longer an option. Not unless you suddenly sprout your own pair of redonkulously red fairy wings or can convince monster-dork to strap on a saddle so you can ride him up into the sky. And you’re not letting Sollux out of sight. Call it useless sentiment. Call it cowardice. Call it whatever the fuck you want, you’re still not going to risk losing the only other sentient being in your current sphere of existence. Even that short trip down to your room gave you’re the heebie-jeebies. It was just too damn quiet. And too still, like walking into a photograph. Like a goddamn tomb.

Jesus, maybe that’s what the afterlife is. Maybe you’re going to spend eternity in your own personal sepulcher. (Best not to think on that too hard.)

There’s a third scenario that flashes through your mind’s eye. If Bro found himself in this situation, maybe he’d just chill the fuck out and do nothing.

“If you can’t do anything, you can’t do anything,” he told you once. (Maybe more than once.) “Worrying is just another way of being scared. It doesn’t do you or anybody else any good, so cut it out already.”

Alright. Yeah. You can do that. Cut it out, Dave. Just cut it out.

You relax, slowly releasing tension from head to toe, just like Bro taught you.

Then you pick up your camera.

You start off by taking a few photos of yourself. You hold the camera up at arm’s length, moving it by degrees until you find that one perfect angle that you swear takes, like, ten whole pounds off and makes you look like the prettiest girl on the internet. (Hey, a guy’s gotta have a warm-up routine.)

It’s not until the flash practically blinds you that you remember you’re not wearing your shades. You swear and damn near drop your camera. That would have been great, you think. Bust up the only decent camera in existence on your first day of eternity.

You hang your camera around your neck by its strap (uncool, but who’s looking?) and pull your shades out of your sylladex. God, they are so trashed. Scratches all over the fucking place. If you were still in the game, this would be no big deal. You could just pop over to the nearest alchemizer and make yourself a shiny, new set. Hell, you could alchemize a thousand new pairs and still have grist enough left over to build yourself a whole planet of whimsical skyscrapers.

But you’re not in the game. You’re dead. There are no more alchemizers. There are no more stores. Maybe your shades are just fucked for eternity. Maybe that’s what being dead means, that nothing will ever be new again. Maybe everything around you is going to break down slowly until all the earthly trappings you dragged with you into the afterlife lie in ruins around you. Maybe you’ll break down too. Maybe your wounds will never heal, and…

That’s right, Dave. You’re a fucking zombie now. That’s a real fucking intelligent assumption based on abso-fucking-lutely nothing.

You pull your old shades out of your sylladex, the ones Bro gave you the day he found your baby ass in that crater. You have no idea how they still fit your almost-fourteen year old head, but that is just another musclebeast you aren’t going to look in the pecs right now.

You lift your camera back up, fix your hair in its lense, and take a few more high-downward angle shots. Satisfied with your ironic warm-up, you move on to photographing cooler shit, like… like…

You could punch monster-dork in the face. There is practically nothing of interest left to photograph. There are a few buildings left in the far, far distance, but you can’t get a shot of the weird-ass alien moons with the fugly green skyscrapers in the foreground, which is what you really want. Anything else would just look stupid. Only a five year old would think a boring old picture of the moon(s) is cool.

You snap a shot anyway, for lack of a better subject. You spend as long as you possibly can fussing over the angle and still waste less time than you were hoping for. You swear, this roof is getting smaller by the minute. You keep backing up, trying to force something interesting into the frame. You nearly trip over the collar and chain monster-dork flipped his shit over earlier.

That’s when you remember the fugly green archway. Perfection.

“Aw, yeah… That’s it. Work it, baby.”

You take like ten shots before all those nagging thought catch back up with you. Maybe this is the last roll of film you’ll ever have. You force the whole thought process to a dead halt before that strained feeling in your chest gets too big and you start wondering if you’re a fucking zombie again.

So, what else in the negaverse is worth wasting your last roll of film on?

You stroll back over to your good buddy monster-dork, make sure the flash is definitely on, line up the frame, and…

Hello. That was definitely a twitch. Unconscious people don’t twitch. (Do they?) And they certainly don’t roll over and get snuggly with your blankets. You captchalogue your camera so you can kneel without wrecking more of your beloved belongings.

“Yo,” you poke him. “Monster-dork. You patch up your brain yet?”

White eyes snap open, creepy as ever. And then you are levitated upside down once again.

“What the fuck?” monster-dork says as he scrambles up out of your blankets. His horns get caught in the fabric, which you would appreciate a lot more if you weren’t worried about him ripping your only set of sheets for the next eternity. (It’s still pretty hillarious though.)

“My question exactly. I thought we were past this. I’m going to be honest, you really don’t make a good first impression, after-buddy.”

“Who the fuck are you and what are you doing here?” Sollux demands to know. _Again._

“It’s me, monster-dork! Remember?” You whip your shades off. “Dave Strider, former resident of planet Earth and unfortunate co-denizen of this afterhell. Don’t tell me you forgot about me.”

That was sarcasm. You 100% expected him to remember you after the brain-damage wore off. But you can read the confusion clearly even in his dead, white eyes. More importantly, he doesn’t show any signs of letting you down.

“Just…” This is not what you expected in any possible scenario. Like, ever. You are pretty much thrown. And upside down. “OK, put me the fuck down, will you? You’re obviously still a little cloudy after the seizure thing. Just calm down and let me explain.”

“Why don’t you exthplain firtht, and then I’ll let you down.”

“Goddamn it, Sollux, I’m not planning on pulling any bullshit! You can trust me! I…” What the fuck can you say to a crazy, brain-damaged troll to convince him you’re not secretly plotting to kill him? “I know your friends! Terezi and Karkat and… Fuck, uh, that guy who typed in blue and was obsessed with horses or some weird shit and the fucking clown and the freaky spider chick and that green one who likes Rose—”

Sollux fortunately cuts you off before you can embarrass yourself further.

“How do you know my friendth?”

“Because they’ve been trolling me since I was like ten years old thanks to some temporal shenanigan bullshit! Now will you please let me down, or do I need to show you my Karkat impression first?”

You really hope he doesn’t ask to see your Karkat impression. You don’t think explaining that you’ve never actually met Karkat in person would help you too much at this point.

“Bullthit. If they’d been trolling you, I’d know about it.”

“Look, do you remember anything about the game? About SBURB?”

“No. Should I?”

He’s giving you that look that means he thinks you’re a crathy vagrant thowaway again. Fucking great.

“Red, flaming meteors destroying the world. Grist. Imps. Denizens. Skaia. Prospit. Derse,” you rattle off, trying to find anything that will trigger his memory just like it triggered yours. “Jack, the fucking unbeatable monster who wrecked all our shit and killed us all half a dozen times. Come on, throw me a bone. Tell me any of this sounds familiar.”

But monster-dork isn’t looking at you anymore. He’s looking at the empty, white collar.

“Before you ask, no, I don’t fucking know where your lusus is. Please don’t flip your shit again. I’m sure he’s dead too.”

That gets his attention, and a decent chunk of his ire. You honestly were trying to be reassuring. Maybe you should make a personal policy to avoid the topic of lusi in the future.

“Tell me what you’re doing here. Now.”

“Watching your ungrateful ass, that’s what I was fucking doing! Not that you remember, but I wiped blood off your face. And I let you lay on my pillow! And that was after you drooled in my fucking hair! Look at this!” you snarl, pointing to the aforementioned drool. “You also attempted to set me on fire and bust my fucking eardrums with your wailing. _And_ you wrecked my favorite shades! By the way, I’ve got your 3D glasses, motherfucker. You want them, you’re going to have to let me down first!”

Losing your temper is perhaps not the fastest way to make friends, you think. Or even re-make them.

But Sollux, it seems, doesn’t quite agree. You’re slowly flipped back upright. Fucking trolls and their fucking backwards emotional bullshit. Your feet aren’t quite touching the ground, but you figure it’s a start. Maybe a show of good faith will help inch you closer to the ground?

“Here,” you say, holding out his glasses. “Found them lying on the ground after you passed out.”

He levitates them out of your hand instead of taking them, ruining the moment of cross-species broship you had planned.

“Ethplain everything,” Sollux orders. “From the beginning.”

“Put me down, and you’ve got a deal.”

You are once again reacquainted with gravity. True to your word, you take a deep mental breath and launch into explanation.


End file.
